Cognitive Functionhttp://www.businessinsider.com/category/cognitive-function
en-usTue, 31 Mar 2015 18:33:38 -0400Tue, 31 Mar 2015 18:33:38 -0400The latest news on Cognitive Function from Business Insiderhttp://static3.businessinsider.com/assets/images/bilogo-250x36-wide-rev.pngBusiness Insiderhttp://www.businessinsider.com
http://www.businessinsider.com/strategies-for-remembering-everything-you-learn-2014-84 strategies for remembering everything you learnhttp://www.businessinsider.com/strategies-for-remembering-everything-you-learn-2014-8
Fri, 13 Feb 2015 15:00:00 -0500Drake Baer
<p><img src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/53e503e46bb3f7d968dc7d5b-800-/chalkboard-teacher-black-white.jpg" border="0" alt="chalkboard teacher black white" width="800" style="vertical-align: top;"></p><p>If you're going to learn anything, you need <a href="http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/10/smart-strategies-that-help-students-learn-how-to-learn/" target="_blank">two kinds of prior knowledge</a>:&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1" style="padding-left: 30px;">•&nbsp;knowledge about the subject at hand, like math, history, or programming</p>
<p class="p1" style="padding-left: 30px;">•&nbsp;knowledge about how learning actually works</p>
<p>The bad news: Our education system kinda skips one of them, which is terrifying, given that your ability to learn is such a huge predictor of success in life, from achieving in academics to getting ahead at work. It all requires&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/learning-hacks-that-will-maximize-your-memory-2014-6">mastering skill after skill</a>.&nbsp;</p>
<p><span>"Parents and educators are pretty good at imparting the first kind of knowledge," <a href="http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/10/smart-strategies-that-help-students-learn-how-to-learn/" target="_blank">shares psych writer Annie Murphy Paul</a>. "We're comfortable talking about concrete information: names, dates, numbers, facts. But the guidance we offer on the act of learning itself — the 'metacognitive' aspects of learning — is more hit-or-miss, and it shows."</span></p>
<p>To wit, new education research shows that low-achieving students have "<a href="http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/10/smart-strategies-that-help-students-learn-how-to-learn/" target="_blank">substantial deficits</a>" in their understanding of the cognitive strategies that allow people to learn well. This, Paul <a href="http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/10/smart-strategies-that-help-students-learn-how-to-learn/" target="_blank">says</a>, suggests that part of the reason students perform poorly is that they don't know a lot about how learning actually works.&nbsp;</p>
<p>It's a culture-wide issue.</p>
<p>Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel,&nbsp;<span>psychologists at&nbsp;</span><span>Washington University in St. Louis&nbsp;</span>&nbsp;and coauthors of&nbsp;"<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Make-It-Stick-Successful-Learning/dp/0674729013/ref=pd_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&amp;refRID=0ZQYPYEW79NRSMJYVPZM" target="_blank">Make It Stick: The Science Of Successful Learning</a>," say that "how we teach and study is largely a mix of theory, lore, and intuition."</p>
<p><span><span><span><span>So let's cut through that lore. Here are learning strategies that really work.&nbsp;</span></span></span></span></p>
<h3>Force yourself to recall.&nbsp;&nbsp;</h3>
<p><span>The least-fun part of effective learning is that it's hard. In fact, the "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Make-It-Stick-Successful-Learning/dp/0674729013/ref=pd_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&amp;refRID=0ZQYPYEW79NRSMJYVPZM" target="_blank">Make It Stick</a>" authors contend that when learning if difficult, you're doing&nbsp;<em>your best</em> learning, in the same way that lifting a weight at the limit of your capacity makes you strongest.&nbsp;<em><br></em></span></p>
<p>It's simple, though not easy, to take advantage of this: force yourself to recall a fact. <a href="http://www.cram.com/" target="_blank">Flashcards</a> are a great ally in this, since they force you to supply answers.</p>
<h3><strong>Don't fall for fluency.</strong></h3>
<p>When you're reading something and it feels easy, what you're experiencing is&nbsp;<em>fluency</em>.</p>
<p>It'll only get you in trouble.</p>
<p>Example: Say, for instance, you're at the airport and you're trying to remember which gate your flight to Chicago is waiting for you at. You look at the terminal monitors — it's B44. You think to yourself, <em>oh, B44, that's easy</em>. Then you walk away, idly check your phone, and instantly forget where you're going.&nbsp;</p>
<p>The alternative: You read the gate number. Then you turn away from the monitor and ask yourself,&nbsp;<em>what's the gate?</em> If you can&nbsp;<em>recall</em> that it's B44, you're good to go.&nbsp;</p>
<h3>Connect the new thing to the old things.</h3>
<p><span>"The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to prior knowledge," the&nbsp;<span>"<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Make-It-Stick-Successful-Learning/dp/0674729013/ref=pd_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&amp;refRID=0ZQYPYEW79NRSMJYVPZM" target="_blank">Make It Stick</a>" authors write,</span>&nbsp;"the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later."&nbsp;</span></p>
<p>When you're weaving in new threads into your pre-existing web of knowledge, you're&nbsp;<em>elaborating.&nbsp;</em></p>
<p>One killer technique is to come up with real-life examples of principles you've just uncovered. If you've just learned about <a href="http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/75/poems-of-emily-bronte/5180/stars/" target="_blank">slant rhyme</a>, you could <a href="http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/75/poems-of-emily-bronte/5180/stars/" target="_blank">read poems that exhibit it</a>. If you've just discovered heat transfer, you could think of the way a warm cup of cocoa disperses warmth into your hands on a cold winter's day.</p>
<h3>Reflect, reflect, reflect.</h3>
<p><span><span>Looking back helps.&nbsp;</span></span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">In a Harvard Business School </span><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/this-15-minute-activity-will-make-you-more-successful-at-work-2014-5">study</a><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">, employees who were onboarded to a call center had&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">22.8% higher performance than the control group when they spent just 15 minutes reflecting on their work at the end of the day.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span><span>"When people have the opportunity to reflect, they experience a boost in self-efficacy," <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/this-15-minute-activity-will-make-you-more-successful-at-work-2014-5">HBS professor Francesca Gino tells us</a>. "They feel more confident that they can achieve things. As a result, they put more effort into what they're doing and what they learn."</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>While reflecting may seem like it leads to working less, it leads to achieving more.&nbsp;</span></span></p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/this-15-minute-activity-will-make-you-more-successful-at-work-2014-5" >This 15-Minute Activity Will Make You More Successful At Work</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/strategies-for-remembering-everything-you-learn-2014-8#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> <p>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/answers-illegal-questions-job-interviews-2015-1">How To Respond To 8 Illegal Interview Questions</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffetts-favorite-critical-thinking-exercise-2014-10Here's How To Do Warren Buffett's Favorite Critical Thinking Exercisehttp://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffetts-favorite-critical-thinking-exercise-2014-10
Fri, 03 Oct 2014 15:58:03 -0400Drake Baer
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;"><img src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/5419f8c769bedde864724d90-1200-600/king-and-warren-buffett-2.jpg" border="0" alt="King and Warren Buffett">The Sage of Omaha has a ridiculously fit mind —&nbsp;</span><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-speaks-on-cnbc-oct-2-2014-10">anything he says becomes news</a><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">. &nbsp;</span></p>
<p>While Buffett's brain is <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-favorite-business-books-2014-8?op=1">constantly working to crank through books</a>, play bridge, and lobby Congress, the man is also deliberate about doing mental weightlifting.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Bill Gates — <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-warren-buffett-friendship-2014-10">a close friend of the investor</a> — recounted in<span>&nbsp;</span><a href="http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1996/02/05/207334/index.htm" target="_blank">a&nbsp;</a><span><a href="http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1996/02/05/207334/index.htm" target="_blank">1996 Fortune column</a>&nbsp;</span>an exercise Buffett liked to do in critical thinking.</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">It's part of how <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-warren-buffett-friendship-2014-10">their friendship started</a>.</span></p>
<p class="p1">"On that first day, [Buffett] introduced me to an intriguing analytic exercise that he does," Gates <a href="http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1996/02/05/207334/index.htm"><span class="s1">said</span></a>. "He'll choose a year — say, 1970 — and examine the 10 highest market-capitalization companies from around then. Then he'll go forward to 1990 and look at how those companies fared. His enthusiasm for the exercise was contagious."</p>
<p class="p1"><span style="background-color: #ffffff;">Pretty cool, right? With this exercise, you can practice spotting trends, analyze why some companies sustain success while others slip, and how technology advances and cultural norms shape business.</span></p>
<p class="p1">We did a version of this exercise, comparing the market leaders over a<span>&nbsp;20-year interval</span>. We looked at&nbsp;<span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">1990 and 2010, using information provided to us by&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">Howard Silverblatt, a s</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">enior index analyst at&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">S&amp;P Dow Jones Indices</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">Here are the 10 largest market-cap companies of 1990:&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1" style="padding-left: 30px;">1. IBM ($64.53 billion)<br>2. Exxon ($64.49 billion) <br>3. GE ($50.34 billion)<br>4. Philip Morris ($47.89 billion)<br>5. Royal Dutch Petrol ($42.15 billion) <br>6. Bristol-Myers Squibb ($35.2 billion)<br>7. Merck &amp; Co ($34.81 billion)<br>8. Wal-Mart Stores ($34.26 billion)<br>9. AT&amp;T ($32.8 billion)<br>10. Coca-Cola ($31.05 billion)</p>
<p class="p1">And the 10 largest market-cap companies of 2010:&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1" style="padding-left: 30px;">1. Exxon Mobil ($368.71 billion)<br>2. Apple Inc. ($295.89 billion)<br>3. Microsoft ($238.79 billion)<br>4. Berkshire Hathaway ($198.03 billion)<br>5. GE ($194.88 billion)<br>6. Wal-Mart Stores ($192.1 billion)<br>7. Google ($189.94 billion)<br>8. Chevron ($183.64 billion)<br>9. IBM ($182.32 billion)<br>10. Procter &amp; Gamble ($180.07 billion)</p>
<p class="p1">Summoning our inner Buffett, let's look at the overall shifts. F<span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">our companies — IBM, Exxon, GE, and Wal-Mart — stayed on top, while six fell off. Over the same period, several new entrants — Apple, Google, and Microsoft — claimed top spots.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">There are a few takeaways.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span style="background-color: #ffffff;">First, changes in culture can lay waste to a consumer goods empire. Tobacco maker Philip Morris was gigantic back in 1990 when smoking was a popular habit, but legislation has deeply cut into its business. California rolled out the first smoking ban in 1995, starting a state-by-state trend that's curbed Philip Morris' dominance. And having all those Marlboro Men <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/eric-lawson-who-portrayed-marlboro-man-dies-at-72/2014/01/27/6662d0aa-8772-11e3-916e-e01534b1e132_story.html" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: #ffffff;">die of smoking-related diseases didn't help much</span></a>, either.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">Second, major corporations can sustain themselves if they stay "agile," as management experts like to say. GE&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/companies-shaped-the-modern-world-2014-8?op=1" target="_blank">has been so innovative for so long that it's shaped a lot of modern life</a>.&nbsp;Thomas Edison's company kept it up into the new century, coming out with medical breakthroughs like&nbsp;<a href="http://www.ge.com/about-us/history/2005-2010" target="_blank">high-definition brain scans</a>&nbsp;and <a href="http://www.ge.com/about-us/history/2001-2004" target="_blank">cancer detection devices</a>. And while IBM slipped from its No. 1 rank as the world's most valuable company in 1990, the computing behemoth successfully moved into China and other emerging markets, and hopped onto massive trends in tech like cloud computing, <a href="http://www.ibm.com/investor/pdf/2010_ibm_higher_value.pdf" target="_blank">bringing in billions in revenue</a>.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">Third, monopolistic companies can stay dominant if their market stays stable. Wal-Mart has presided over American low-cost retail for decades now, and the company shows no signs of slipping. <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-google-monopoly-2014-9">Like billionaire investor Peter Thiel says, the monopoly is the finest form of capitalism</a>.</p>
<p class="p1">If you have more observations, tell us in the comments.&nbsp;</p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-warren-buffett-friendship-2014-10" >How Bill Gates And Warren Buffett Overcame A Totally Awkward First Meeting To Become Best Friends</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffetts-favorite-critical-thinking-exercise-2014-10#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/emotional-intelligence-is-overrated-2014-9Wharton Psychologist Says Emotional Intelligence Is Overratedhttp://www.businessinsider.com/emotional-intelligence-is-overrated-2014-9
Tue, 30 Sep 2014 17:07:45 -0400Adam Grant
<p><img src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/542b115169bedd652202ebce-1000-500/watching-listening-focused-attentive-social-media-roi-bi-events-september-2012-bi-dng-2.jpg" border="0" alt="watching, listening, focused, attentive, social media roi, bi events, september 2012, bi, dng"></p><p><em>LinkedIn Influencer,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=69244073&amp;authType=name&amp;authToken=M8J0&amp;trk=pulse-det-athr_prof-art_hdr">Adam Grant</a>,&nbsp;published this post originally on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20140930125543-69244073-emotional-intelligence-is-overrated">LinkedIn</a>.</em><span><br></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Not long ago, the CEO of a sales company mentioned that he was spending millions of dollars to train his employees in emotional intelligence. He asked if it was possible to assess emotional intelligence during the interview process, which would allow him to hire salespeople who already excelled in this area.</span></p>
<p>I said yes, it can be done — but I wouldn't recommend doing it.</p>
<p>Warning: if you're a devoted member of an emotional intelligence cult, you may have a strong negative reaction to the data in this post. In case that happens, I've offered some guidance at the bottom on how to respond.</p>
<p>To make sure we're on the same page, let's be clear about what emotional intelligence is.&nbsp;<a href="http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093646" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Experts agree&nbsp;</a>that it has three major elements: perceiving, understanding, and regulating emotions. Perceiving emotions is your ability to recognize different feelings. When looking at someone's face, do you know the difference between joy and contentment, anxiety and sadness, or surprise and contempt? Understanding emotions is how well you identify the causes and consequences of different feelings. For example, can you figure out what will make your colleagues frustrated versus angry? Frustration occurs when people are blocked from achieving a goal; anger is a response to being mistreated or wronged. Regulating emotions is your effectiveness in managing what you and others feel. If you have a bad day but need to give an inspiring speech, can you psych yourself up and motivate your audience anyway?</p>
<p>I told the CEO that although these skills could be useful in sales, he'd be better off assessing cognitive ability. That's traditional intelligence: the capability to reason and solve verbal, logical, and mathematical problems. Salespeople with high cognitive ability would be able to analyze information about customer needs and think on their feet to keep customers coming back. The CEO was convinced that emotional intelligence would matter more.</p>
<p>To see who was right, we designed a study. Working with Dane Barnes of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.optimizehire.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Optimize Hire</a>, we gave hundreds of salespeople two validated tests of emotional intelligence that measured their abilities to perceive, understand, and regulate emotions. We also gave them a five-minute test of their cognitive ability, where they had to solve a few logic problems. Then, we tracked their sales revenue over several months.</p>
<p>Cognitive ability was more than five times more powerful than emotional intelligence. The average employee with high cognitive ability generated annual revenue of over $195,000, compared with $159,000 for those with moderate cognitive ability and $109,000 for those with low cognitive ability. Emotional intelligence added nothing after measuring cognitive ability.</p>
<p><img src="http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/542b1249ecad04a02002ebd2-1200-600/salesman-salesperson-sales-manager-6.jpg" border="0" alt="salesman salesperson sales manager">The CEO wasn't convinced: maybe they didn't take the emotional intelligence test seriously enough. We ran the study again — this time with hundreds of job applicants, who knew that their results could affect whether they were hired. Once again, cognitive ability dramatically outperformed emotional intelligence.</p>
<p>I happen to find emotional intelligence fascinating; I teach the topic in the classroom and have&nbsp;<a href="http://amj.aom.org/content/56/6/1703.abstract" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">published my own research on it</a>. As much as I like it, though, I believe it's a mistake to base hiring or promotion decisions on it.</p>
<p>A few years ago, researchers Dana Joseph and Dan Newman wanted to find out how much emotional intelligence really influenced job performance. They&nbsp;<a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/apl/95/1/54/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">compiled every systematic study</a>&nbsp;that has ever tested emotional intelligence and cognitive ability in the workplace — dozens of studies with thousands of employees in 191 different jobs.</p>
<p>When Daniel Goleman&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Intelligence-Matter-More-Than/dp/055338371X" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">popularized emotional intelligence</a>&nbsp;in 1995, he argued provocatively that "it can matter more than IQ." But just as I found with salespeople, every study comparing the two has shown the opposite. In Joseph and Newman's&nbsp;<a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/apl/95/1/54/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">comprehensive analysis</a>, cognitive ability accounted for more than 14% of job performance. Emotional intelligence accounted for less than 1%.</p>
<p>This isn't to say that emotional intelligence is useless. It predicted higher performance in jobs where you have to deal with emotions every day, like sales, real estate, and counseling. If you're selling a house or helping people cope with tragedies, it's very useful to know what they're feeling and respond appropriately. But in jobs that lack these emotional demands — like engineering, accounting, or science — emotional intelligence predicted&nbsp;<em>lower</em>&nbsp;performance.</p>
<p>If your work is primarily about dealing with data, things, and ideas rather than people and feelings, it's not necessarily advantageous to be skilled in reading and regulating emotions. If your job is to fix a car or balance numbers in a spreadsheet, paying attention to emotions might distract you from working efficiently and effectively.</p>
<p>Even in emotionally demanding work, when it comes to job performance, cognitive ability still proves more consequential than emotional intelligence. Cognitive ability is the capacity to learn. The higher your cognitive ability, the easier it is for you to develop emotional intelligence when you need it. (This is one of the reasons that emotional intelligence and cognitive ability turn out to&nbsp;<a href="http://asq.sagepub.com/content/51/1/1.short" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">correlate positively</a>, not negatively.)</p>
<p>As better tests of emotional intelligence are designed, our knowledge may change. But for now, the best available evidence suggests that emotional intelligence is&nbsp;<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/the-dark-side-of-emotional-intelligence/282720/?single_page=true" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">not a panacea</a>. Let's recognize it for what it is: a set of skills that can be beneficial in situations where emotional information is rich or vital.</p>
<p>If you felt intense negative emotions while reading this post, it's an excellent opportunity to put emotional intelligence into action.</p>
<p><strong>Step 1: Recognize the emotion.</strong> Is it disgust? Probably not — that's&nbsp;<a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&amp;UID=2008-07784-047" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">usually reserved</a>&nbsp;for gross foods, sights, and smells. Is it hostility? More likely:&nbsp;<a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1991-99033-001" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">hostility&nbsp;</a>is anger directed toward other people.</p>
<p><strong>Step 2: Analyze the causes of the emotion.</strong> Why are you feeling hostile? Years ago, the psychologist George Kelly&nbsp;<a href="http://www.oikos.org/kelhostility.htm" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">argued&nbsp;</a>that hostility occurs when we are attempting to "extort confirmation of personal hypotheses that have already proved themselves to be invalid." In other words, you might be feeling hostile because the data are clear that emotional intelligence has been overrated, but you don't want to admit it.</p>
<p><strong>Step 3: Regulate the emotion.</strong> Maybe this isn't as terrible as it seems. You've been able to update invalidated beliefs before. Napoleon wasn't short. Pluto isn't technically a planet. Swimming after eating isn't dangerous. Miley Cyrus isn't actually a great role model. The LOST writers didn't really have a master plan.</p>
<h3>More from Adam Grant:</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20140918134337-69244073-overcoming-the-fear-of-public-speaking?trk=prof-post">How I Overcame The Fear Of Public Speaking</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20140717115531-69244073-should-teammates-get-equal-pay?trk=mp-reader-card">Should Teammates Get Equal Pay?</a></li>
</ul><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/mistake-people-make-with-emotional-intelligence-2014-8" >The Mistake Everybody Makes With Emotional Intelligence</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/emotional-intelligence-is-overrated-2014-9#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/nootropics-from-nootrobox-2014-8I Ate Brain Candy For A Week To Make Myself Smarter And More Alerthttp://www.businessinsider.com/nootropics-from-nootrobox-2014-8
Fri, 29 Aug 2014 11:52:00 -0400Dylan Love
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/54009bb269bedd0177a1232f-1200-924/photo 1-46.jpg" border="0" alt="nootrobox"></p><p>I guess you'd have to call it Birchbox for cognitive pharmaceuticals.</p>
<p>A company called Nootrobox will mail you brain-boosting pills on the regular for your choice of $30 or $60 a pop, depending on how much you want at a time.</p>
<p>These pills are mental supplements called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nootropic">nootropics</a> (pronounced "new-oh-tropics") that purport to help your mind operate at its peak capabilities when it comes to pesky tasks related to memory, focus, and attention.</p>
<p>I put my own personal thinking machine on the line to see what it's like to introduce these potential miracle drugs into my body. The FDA has evaluated all the ingredients contained within them, and everything is "<span>either GRAS (generally regarded as safe) and/or acceptable as a dietary supplement compound." Good enough for me.</span></p>
<p>The Nootrobox arrived containing two small blue glass bottles full of green pills with a transparent coating. Each pill contains a blend of nootropics the company brands as "Rise." In nootropics-speak, each pill is a "stack," or combination of ingredients designed to get one's mind in a particular improved state.</p>
<p>The blend consists of only three ingredients. Specifically these are&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacopa">bacopa</a>&nbsp;(linked to improved memory and comprehension), <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17182482">L-theanine</a> (linked to increased levels of dopamine and serotonin, those happy neurotransmitters in the brain), and a little caffeine (which serves to reduce fatigue and restore alertness).</p>
<p>Nootrobox suggests taking one of their Rise pills in place of drinking a cup of coffee to get the dust out from between your ears each morning. A second class of nootropics users might take a second one with that day's lunch.</p>
<p><img class="float_left" src="http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/54009bd6eab8ea0228669019-1200-924/photo 4-27.jpg" border="0" alt="nootrobox">The only aim in taking these supplements is to maintain a focused, less-stressed attitude throughout the day. In my week of popping pills, I can attest that I certainly did feel a good deal sharper and focused than I'm accustomed to. It's a headspace I wouldn't mind occupying more often.</p>
<p>In the interest of gathering some external data<span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, I asked my colleague <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/author/steven-tweedie">Steve Tweedie</a> if I seemed any different this past week. He somehow tolerates sitting next to me for many hours every day, so if anyone would notice a change in my attitude and behavior, it'd be him.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">He said,&nbsp;</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">"You seem a little more energetic. More talkative. It's odd. I wasn't really thinking about it before."</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">We appear to have a case of mild but positive change on our hands. Pretty cool.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If this grabs your attention, <a href="https://nootrobox.com/">check out Nootrobox here</a>. Their FAQ section delves into a number of specific concerns that people may reasonably have, but my experience was one of total innocuity and small, desirable benefits.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">You can order 30 pills for $29, 70 pills for $59, or a 7-pill "dabbler pack" for $9. If you subscribe to receive your nootropics monthly, the company'll knock 10% off of everything.</span></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/nootropics-from-nootrobox-2014-8#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/strategies-for-remembering-everything-you-learn-2014-84 Strategies For Remembering Everything You Learnhttp://www.businessinsider.com/strategies-for-remembering-everything-you-learn-2014-8
Fri, 08 Aug 2014 15:37:33 -0400Drake Baer
<p><img src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/53e503e46bb3f7d968dc7d5b-800-/chalkboard-teacher-black-white.jpg" border="0" alt="chalkboard teacher black white" width="800" style="vertical-align: top;"></p><p>If you're going to learn anything, you need <a href="http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/10/smart-strategies-that-help-students-learn-how-to-learn/" target="_blank">two kinds of prior knowledge</a>:&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1" style="padding-left: 30px;">•&nbsp;knowledge about the subject at hand, like math, history, or programming</p>
<p class="p1" style="padding-left: 30px;">•&nbsp;knowledge about how learning actually works</p>
<p>The bad news: Our education system kinda skips one of them, which is terrifying, given that your ability to learn is such a huge predictor of success in life, from achieving in academics to getting ahead at work. It all requires&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/learning-hacks-that-will-maximize-your-memory-2014-6">mastering skill after skill</a>.&nbsp;</p>
<p><span>"Parents and educators are pretty good at imparting the first kind of knowledge," <a href="http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/10/smart-strategies-that-help-students-learn-how-to-learn/" target="_blank">shares psych writer Annie Murphy Paul</a>. "We're comfortable talking about concrete information: names, dates, numbers, facts. But the guidance we offer on the act of learning itself — the 'metacognitive' aspects of learning — is more hit-or-miss, and it shows."</span></p>
<p>To wit, new education research shows that low-achieving students have "<a href="http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/10/smart-strategies-that-help-students-learn-how-to-learn/" target="_blank">substantial deficits</a>" in their understanding of the cognitive strategies that allow people to learn well. This, Paul <a href="http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/10/smart-strategies-that-help-students-learn-how-to-learn/" target="_blank">says</a>, suggests that part of the reason students perform poorly is that they don't know a lot about how learning actually works.&nbsp;</p>
<p>It's a culture-wide issue.</p>
<p>Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel,&nbsp;<span>psychologists at&nbsp;</span><span>Washington University in St. Louis&nbsp;</span>&nbsp;and coauthors of&nbsp;"<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Make-It-Stick-Successful-Learning/dp/0674729013/ref=pd_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&amp;refRID=0ZQYPYEW79NRSMJYVPZM" target="_blank">Make It Stick: The Science Of Successful Learning</a>," say that "how we teach and study is largely a mix of theory, lore, and intuition."</p>
<p><span><span><span><span>So let's cut through that lore. Here are learning strategies that really work.&nbsp;</span></span></span></span></p>
<h3>Force yourself to recall.&nbsp;&nbsp;</h3>
<p><span>The least-fun part of effective learning is that it's hard. In fact, the "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Make-It-Stick-Successful-Learning/dp/0674729013/ref=pd_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&amp;refRID=0ZQYPYEW79NRSMJYVPZM" target="_blank">Make It Stick</a>" authors contend that when learning if difficult, you're doing&nbsp;<em>your best</em> learning, in the same way that lifting a weight at the limit of your capacity makes you strongest.&nbsp;<em><br></em></span></p>
<p>It's simple, though not easy, to take advantage of this: force yourself to recall a fact. <a href="http://www.cram.com/" target="_blank">Flashcards</a> are a great ally in this, since they force you to supply answers.</p>
<h3><strong>Don't fall for fluency.</strong></h3>
<p>When you're reading something and it feels easy, what you're experiencing is&nbsp;<em>fluency</em>.</p>
<p>It'll only get you in trouble.</p>
<p>Example: Say, for instance, you're at the airport and you're trying to remember which gate your flight to Chicago is waiting for you at. You look at the terminal monitors — it's B44. You think to yourself, <em>oh, B44, that's easy</em>. Then you walk away, idly check your phone, and instantly forget where you're going.&nbsp;</p>
<p>The alternative: You read the gate number. Then you turn away from the monitor and ask yourself,&nbsp;<em>what's the gate?</em> If you can&nbsp;<em>recall</em> that it's B44, you're good to go.&nbsp;</p>
<h3>Connect the new thing to the old things.</h3>
<p><span>"The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to prior knowledge," the&nbsp;<span>"<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Make-It-Stick-Successful-Learning/dp/0674729013/ref=pd_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&amp;refRID=0ZQYPYEW79NRSMJYVPZM" target="_blank">Make It Stick</a>" authors write,</span>&nbsp;"the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later."&nbsp;</span></p>
<p>When you're weaving in new threads into your pre-existing web of knowledge, you're&nbsp;<em>elaborating.&nbsp;</em></p>
<p>One killer technique is to come up with real-life examples of principles you've just uncovered. If you've just learned about <a href="http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/75/poems-of-emily-bronte/5180/stars/" target="_blank">slant rhyme</a>, you could <a href="http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/75/poems-of-emily-bronte/5180/stars/" target="_blank">read poems that exhibit it</a>. If you've just discovered heat transfer, you could think of the way a warm cup of cocoa disperses warmth into your hands on a cold winter's day.</p>
<h3>Reflect, reflect, reflect.</h3>
<p><span><span>Looking back helps.&nbsp;</span></span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">In a Harvard Business School </span><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/this-15-minute-activity-will-make-you-more-successful-at-work-2014-5">study</a><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">, employees who were onboarded to a call center had&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">22.8% higher performance than the control group when they spent just 15 minutes reflecting on their work at the end of the day.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span><span>"When people have the opportunity to reflect, they experience a boost in self-efficacy," <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/this-15-minute-activity-will-make-you-more-successful-at-work-2014-5">HBS professor Francesca Gino tells us</a>. "They feel more confident that they can achieve things. As a result, they put more effort into what they're doing and what they learn."</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>While reflecting may seem like it leads to working less, it leads to achieving more.&nbsp;</span></span></p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/this-15-minute-activity-will-make-you-more-successful-at-work-2014-5" >This 15-Minute Activity Will Make You More Successful At Work</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/strategies-for-remembering-everything-you-learn-2014-8#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/these-3-factors-determine-how-well-you-remember-something-2014-6These 3 Factors Determine How Well You Remember Somethinghttp://www.businessinsider.com/these-3-factors-determine-how-well-you-remember-something-2014-6
Mon, 23 Jun 2014 12:05:00 -0400Drake Baer
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/53a4b0bb6bb3f79b4a228d8f-480-/remember-memory-reminder.jpg" border="0" alt="remember memory reminder " width="480" style="float: right;" /></p><p>Memory is at the center of learning anything.&nbsp;</p>
<p>The Greeks knew this: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemosyne" target="_blank">memory was the mother of the muses</a>.&nbsp;</p>
<p>And just like you gotta take care of your mother, you gotta take care of your memory.<span style="background-color: #ffff00;"><br /></span></p>
<p>In "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Make-It-Stick-Successful-Learning/dp/0674729013" target="_blank">Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning</a>," authors Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel help us to do that.&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">"How readily you can recall knowledge from your internal archives is determined&nbsp;</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">by context, by recent use, and by the number and vividness of cues that you have linked to the knowledge and can call on to help bring it forth," t<span>hey write.</span><br /></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">There's a lot in that statement. Let's unpack it point by point.&nbsp;</span></p>
<h3>Context: How connected a memory is with the rest of what you know.</h3>
<p>Throughout "Make It Stick," the authors emphasize that if you're going to understand a new piece of information, you need to tie it to what you already know.&nbsp;</p>
<p>A liberal arts-y example:&nbsp;</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">"... the more of the unfolding story of history you know, the more if it you can learn. And the more ways you give that story meaning, say by connecting it to your understanding of human ambition and the untidiness of fate, the better the story stays with you."&nbsp;</p>
<p>Also, tying abstract ideas to concrete examples helps. Say, for instance, you're trying to get a gra<span style="background-color: #ffffff;">sp of the property of angular momentum in ph</span>ysics. Instead of rereading its definition, the authors urge you to look for for examples, "like the way a figure skater's rotation speeds up as she draws her arms to her chest."&nbsp;<span>&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: #ffff00;"><br /></span></p>
<p>In both cases, you're integrating new knowledge into the base of understanding you've already got. This is why elaboration &mdash; <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/learning-hacks-that-will-maximize-your-memory-2014-6">the process of taking a piece of information, internalizing it, and putting it into your own words</a> &mdash; is such an awesome learning technique.&nbsp;</p>
<h3>Recency: To recall something easily, keep it fresh.</h3>
<p>One of the most old-school principles of learning is <em><a href="http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1414539?uid=3739256&amp;uid=2&amp;uid=4&amp;sid=21104342805473" target="_blank">the Recency effect</a>.&nbsp;</em>It states we remember things we've encountered recently way better than those that happened in the past; you'll have a shot at remembering a phone number you dialed 20 minutes ago, <a href="http://www.mysdcc.sdccd.edu/Staff/Instructor_Development/Content/HTML/Laws_of_Learning.htm" target="_blank">but very little if it was 20 days ago</a>.&nbsp;<span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">The takeaway, then, is a simple one: If you're trying to learn something for your job, practice or study it regularly, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/learning-hacks-that-will-maximize-your-memory-2014-6">so that it stays fresh in your mind</a>.&nbsp;</span></p>
<h3>Cues: Prompts that help you remember.&nbsp;</h3>
<p>"Having effective retrieval cues is an aspect of learning that often goes overlooked," the authors write. "The task is more than committing knowledge to memory. Being able to retrieve it when we need it is just as important." &nbsp;</p>
<p>Cues act like guideposts for remembering.</p>
<p>If you ever forget people's names after you meet them, being aware of cues can be super helpful, <a href="http://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Retrieval%20Cue" target="_blank">as this example suggests</a>:&nbsp;</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">"... we don't only store the name and appearance of the new acquaintance in our memory (when we meet someone). We also include external cues about the situation like what kind of party it was, who made the introduction, what cocktails were served, or what music was playing. We also include internal cues like what mood you were in at the time, or what you thought of the person being introduced. When we try to recall the person, having one or more of these cues present will help us remember better."</p>
<p>In other words, there's a whole suite of inputs that happen when you're trying to learn something &mdash; all of your senses can be involved in recall.&nbsp;</p>
<p>It's one reason, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/you-remember-books-better-than-ebooks-2014-6">cognitive psychologists say</a>, that digging into paper books is more useful than reading on your Kindle.&nbsp;</p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/bad-learning-habits-2014-6" >3 Terrible Learning Habits You Probably Picked Up In School</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/these-3-factors-determine-how-well-you-remember-something-2014-6#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/r-air-pollution-is-linked-to-cognitive-decline-in-later-years-2014-18Air Pollution Linked To Brain Problems Later In Lifehttp://www.businessinsider.com/r-air-pollution-is-linked-to-cognitive-decline-in-later-years-2014-18
Wed, 18 Jun 2014 16:20:00 -0400Shereen Lehman
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><img src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/52a76ea46bb3f7c17e66bfa9-1200-800/rtx1669i.jpg" border="0" alt="pollution" />NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The tiny particles in vehicle exhaust and other sources of air pollution may hasten cognitive decline in older adults, according to a new U. S. study.</span></p>
<p>&ldquo;We decided to examine the link between air pollution and cognitive function in older adults because there is growing evidence that fine particulate matter air pollution affects brain health and development, but relatively little attention has been given to what this means for the aging brain,&rdquo; said Jennifer Ailshire, who co-wrote the report.</p>
<p>Ailshire is with the Center for Biodemography and Population Health and the Andrus Gerontology Center at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.</p>
<p>She, along with Philippa Clarke of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, say that based on their results, improvements in air quality may be an important strategy for reducing age-related cognitive decline.</p>
<p>There has been some evidence that people living in more polluted areas have greater rates of cognitive decline, and the link is not explained by wealth or other social factors, the researchers point out in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B.</p>
<p>They gathered information from one wave of a large ongoing survey started in 1986, and focused their analysis on 780 participants who were 55 years of age or older at the time of the 2001/2002 survey.</p>
<p>Routine measurement of air pollution by census tract did not start until the late 1990s, they explain.</p>
<p>Cognitive function was measured by math and memory tests and participants got a score based on the number of cognitive errors they made.</p>
<p>Air pollution levels for each participant&rsquo;s neighborhood were calculated using fine particulate levels reported by the U.S. EPA&rsquo;s Air Quality System. Those pollution particles 2.5 microns or smaller (PM2.5) can travel deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream, past research has shown.</p>
<p>Ailshire and Clarke found the average PM2.5 concentrations in the study participants&rsquo; environments were 13.8 micrograms per cubic meter, which is above the EPA&rsquo;s air quality standard of 12 micrograms per cubic meter.</p>
<p>Then they compared the cognitive error scores to pollution levels and found that people living in high pollution areas, with 15 micrograms per cubic meter or more of PM2.5 had error scores one and a half times those of the participants who lived in low pollution areas with no more than 5 micrograms per cubic meter.</p>
<p>Poverty and other social factors as well as health problems can influence cognitive function, the authors note. And poorer neighborhoods tend to be more polluted. But after the researchers adjusted for education, employment, gender, marital status and several other factors, the differences in cognitive error rates remained.</p>
<p>&ldquo;The emerging evidence showing a link between air pollution and cognitive function suggests air pollution may harm the brain as well as the heart and lungs,&rdquo; Ailshire said in an email.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Ideally,&rdquo; she and Clarke wrote, they would want long-term data and more exact individual pollution exposures to assess the importance of PM2.5 in cognitive function.</p>
<p>Jennifer Weuve said the new research joins a growing number of large studies that suggest &ldquo;higher exposures to everyday air pollution affect aging brains&rsquo; ability to think.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Weuve, who was not involved in the study, is a researcher at the Rush Institute for Healthy Aging at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.</p>
<p>Scientists &ldquo;believe that particulate matter may affect cognitive function in older adults by its harmful effects on the cardiovascular system - which is connected to the brain through blood vessels - and possibly by directly acting on the brain itself,&rdquo; Weuve said.</p>
<p>This type of air pollution is difficult to avoid. The most important action is the one we take as a society, by regulating the amount of pollution that gets emitted into our air, not by individual actions, she said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Short of confining oneself to an indoor space with filtered air, it is extraordinarily difficult (and absurd) to imagine any one person being able to, for example, stop the air pollution that emanates into his or her environment from an industrial plant tens or hundreds of miles away,&rdquo; Weuve said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Although finding a link between the air we breathe on a daily basis and our long-term brain health is alarming, the good news is that we have made remarkable progress in the last decade in reducing levels of air pollution across the country, and there are efforts underway to further reduce air pollution,&rdquo; Ailshire said.</p>
<p>Still, she added, the public should understand that there are health risks to living in polluted environments, particularly for older adults, and we should all be more aware of issues related to air quality.</p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/air-pollution-map-2014-3" >Air Pollution Kills A Staggering Number Of People — And Here’s Where It’s Worst</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/r-air-pollution-is-linked-to-cognitive-decline-in-later-years-2014-18#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/dehydration-makes-you-dumber-2014-5Here's Why Not Drinking Enough Water Makes You Dumberhttp://www.businessinsider.com/dehydration-makes-you-dumber-2014-5
Thu, 08 May 2014 13:35:49 -0400Drake Baer
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/536bb74269beddbb3033ed14-480-/drinking-water-at-work.jpg" border="0" alt="drinking water at work" width="480" style="float: right;" /></p><p>While <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/minding-the-body/201205/can-sipping-water-make-you-smarter" target="_blank">research shows</a> that just bringing a bottle of water with you to a test can improve your scores, a lack of water leaves your brain parched &mdash; bad news for cognitive performance.&nbsp;</p>
<p>A glance at the studies reveals the many ways dehydration hampers our mental lives:&nbsp;</p>
<ul>
<li>Mental calculation abilities&nbsp;<a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/you-illuminated/201010/why-your-brain-needs-water" target="_blank">go down</a>.</li>
<li>Mood swings&nbsp;<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/02/20/mild-dehydration-causes-a_n_1288964.html" target="_blank">go up</a>.</li>
<li>Irritability&nbsp;<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/02/20/mild-dehydration-causes-a_n_1288964.html" target="_blank">increases</a>.</li>
<li>Fatigue&nbsp;<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/02/20/mild-dehydration-causes-a_n_1288964.html" target="_blank">increases</a>.</li>
<li>Short-term and long-term memory&nbsp;<a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/you-illuminated/201010/why-your-brain-needs-water" target="_blank">are impaired</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p>It's all because our brain cells need water to function.&nbsp;</p>
<p>"Brain cells require a delicate balance between water and various elements to operate," <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/you-illuminated/201010/why-your-brain-needs-water" target="_blank">says</a> University of Texas neuroscientist Joshua Gowin. "When you lose too much water, that balance is disrupted. Your brain cells lose efficiency."&nbsp;</p>
<p>Beyond getting enough sleep and eating healthy food throughout the day, staying hydrated is one of the best ways to stave off performance-eroding fatigue.&nbsp;</p>
<p>There are lots of ways to become dehydrated. Marinating in the summer heat and sweating through a morning workout are obvious places where we lose water, but nutritionists <a href="http://psychcentral.com/news/2012/02/20/dehydration-influences-mood-cognition/35037.html" target="_blank">say</a> that dehydration isn't just a matter of athletics. You'll lose water throughout the day just being in the office, and Gowin notes that the longest we go without fluid intake is the <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/you-illuminated/201010/why-your-brain-needs-water" target="_blank">six to eight hours we're sleeping</a> &mdash; meaning we're dried out by the time we wake up.&nbsp;</p>
<p>What's important is to not wait until you're thirsty, since the feeling of thirst doesn't show up until you've lost 1% to 2% of the water volume in your body.&nbsp;</p>
<p>"By then dehydration is already setting in and starting to impact how our mind and body perform,&rdquo; <a href="http://psychcentral.com/news/2012/02/20/dehydration-influences-mood-cognition/35037.html" target="_blank">says</a> Lawrence E. Armstrong, professor at the University of Connecticut's Human Performance Laboratory. "<span>Dehydration affects all people, and staying properly hydrated is just as important for those who work all day at a computer as it is for marathon runners, who can lose up to 8% of their body weight as water when they compete."&nbsp;</span>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Naturally, the opposite of dehydration is hydration. It's hard to say what the "right" amount of water to drink every day is, since it's dependent on factors like your age, climate, and level of physical activity. But the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/02/20/mild-dehydration-causes-a_n_1288964.html" target="_blank">consensus</a> is around 1 to 2 liters a day, or about 6 to 8 glasses.&nbsp;</p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/surprising-things-that-affect-your-willpower-and-decision-making-2014-4#!K96Er" >14 Surprising Things That Affect Your Willpower And Decision Making</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/dehydration-makes-you-dumber-2014-5#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/r-young-adults-who-do-cardio-may-have-quicker-minds-later-on-2014-02Running At 25 Might Improve Your Brain In Middle Agehttp://www.businessinsider.com/r-young-adults-who-do-cardio-may-have-quicker-minds-later-on-2014-02
Wed, 02 Apr 2014 17:37:00 -0400Kathryn Doyle
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/52d059956da811c70d0b6442-1024-768/running-runners-california-muscular-man-jogging-barefoot-sneakers.jpg" border="0" alt="Running Runners California Muscular Man Jogging Barefoot Sneakers" /></p><p>By Kathryn Doyle</p>
<p>NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The longer you can run when you're young, the faster your mind is likely to be operating in middle age, a new study suggests.</p>
<p>Researchers found that better cardiac fitness in young adults translated to better brain fitness 25 years later, adding to a growing body of evidence that links heart health with mental functioning.</p>
<p>"Our study links fitness, which can be influenced by vigorous activity, but also by general engagement with life and the community or 'being part of things,' with poorer thinking skills at age ages 43 to 55 years," author David R. Jacobs told Reuters Health by email.</p>
<p>Jacobs worked on the new study at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.</p>
<p>He and his coauthors analyzed data on 2,700 men and women over a 25-year period. The participants were recruited in 1985, when they were all between 18 and 30 years old.</p>
<p>In 1985, all participants did a short treadmill test to assess their fitness. The researchers recorded how long each person could maintain running at their top speed.</p>
<p>There were seven follow-up checks over the next 25 years. At the last one, in 2010, researchers tested the participants' mental functioning with three tests of visual memory, reaction speed and the kind of mental control needed to answer a trick question, such as identifying the color of the word yellow written in green ink (correct answer: "green").</p>
<p>In general, people who were more fit at the beginning of the study were more likely to have higher education, to smoke less, to be active more often and to have healthy blood pressure and lower cholesterol than people who were less fit.</p>
<p>For the memory test, researchers showed each person a list of 15 words, then 10 minutes later asked them to recall those words. When they looked at participants' fitness as young adults, they found that for every extra minute an individual could keep sprinting on the treadmill back then, the person remembered .12 more words correctly on the memory test 25 years later.</p>
<p>People who were fitter in youth also performed noticeably better on the reaction speed test and the trick question test, according to the results published in the journal Neurology.</p>
<p>Another recent analysis of the same data linked lower blood pressure and blood sugar in the teen years and twenties with quicker memory and learning skills in middle age (see Reuters Health story of April 1, 2014, here: http://reut.rs/1or6jez).</p>
<p>The two papers taken together indicate that aspects of behavior and fitness at average age 25 predict thinking skills at average age 50, Jacobs said.</p>
<p>The mounting evidence suggests that this heart-brain connection begins working early in life, he said.</p>
<p>It is possible that exercising more at an early age simply lowers blood pressure, which then lowers the risk for cognitive decline and dementia, but the researchers took differences in blood pressure into account, Jacobs said, and the results held.</p>
<p>"My interpretation is that something about being more fit, or just doing better on the specific treadmill test that we included, has a connection to better thinking skills," he said.</p>
<p>"We know lifestyle is absolutely fundamental to this whole picture," said Dr. Jennifer G. Robinson, director of the Prevention Intervention Center at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, who was not involved in the new study.</p>
<p>More and more research is identifying subtle changes in heart health early on that predict brain health later, Robinson told Reuters Health.</p>
<p>We can't say yet that physical activity will improve brain function, but it is a good bet that better physical fitness is a positive thing generally, Jacobs said.</p>
<p>"We find many connections between life and biology in youth that predict who has a better or worse profile in late middle age," he said. "Health starts in childhood, or even before birth."</p>
<p>SOURCE: <a href="http://bit.ly/1f4kQ99" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/1f4kQ99</a> Neurology, online April 2, 2014.</p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/is-walking-just-as-good-as-running-2014-3" >Want To Get In Shape? Walking Might Be Just As Good As Running</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/r-young-adults-who-do-cardio-may-have-quicker-minds-later-on-2014-02#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/knowledge-pills-2014-3Coming Soon, Maybe: 'Knowledge Pills' That You Eat To Automatically Learn Anythinghttp://www.businessinsider.com/knowledge-pills-2014-3
Tue, 18 Mar 2014 13:25:00 -0400Dylan Love
<p><img src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/532870d0ecad04c708ed9302-1011-505/i-know-kung-fu.jpg" border="0" alt="i know kung fu" /></p><p>Nicholas Negroponte, founder of <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/mit-media-lab-futuristic-projects-2013-3">the MIT Media Lab</a>, appeared on stage in Vancouver at TED's 30th anniversary event last night and made a number of predictions about what technology will do over the next 30 years. <a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/03/negropodamus-disses-internet-of-things-predicts-knowledge-pills/">Via Ars Technica</a>, here's his most startling one:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">In 30 years, Negroponte said, we&rsquo;re going to be able to literally ingest information. Once information is in your bloodstream, some kind of mechanism could deposit the information in the brain. You could take a pill and learn English or the works of Shakespeare. He said little else on the subject, but Negroponte assured the audience that the idea is not as ridiculous as it seems.</p>
<p>Negroponte is basically hypothesizing a pill you can swallow to instantly learn French or computer programming or anything else, something akin to the moment in "The Matrix" when Neo "learns kung fu" by interfacing his brain with a computer.</p>
<p>Negroponte's prediction has more basis in reality than you likely expect &mdash; scientists <a href="http://io9.com/scientists-watch-glowing-molecules-morph-into-memories-1509819147">can already watch</a> memory-forming molecules come together in the brain as a physical representation of new knowledge. Negroponte is merely talking about doing it without the human being consciously involved. Many smart people have made reasonable links between quantum physics and theories of consciousness that suggest that weird quantum principles like entanglement can help explain how we learn and remember things (see <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-transhumanism-2013-12">our previous reporting on transhumanism</a> for much more on this).</p>
<p>Negroponte's hypothetical "knowledge pills" would only need to be an expression of applied quantum physics.</p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/carnegie-mellon-trash-talking-scrabble-robot-2014-3" >Carnegie Mellon has a trash-talking Scrabble-playing robot named Victor</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/knowledge-pills-2014-3#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-story-of-the-man-with-no-memory-2013-5 The Incredible Story Of The Man With No Memoryhttp://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-story-of-the-man-with-no-memory-2013-5
Fri, 14 Feb 2014 06:22:16 -0500Suzanna Corkin
<p><em><img style="float:right;" src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/518e82996bb3f7f726000005-400-/henrygustav1.jpg" border="0" alt="Henry_Gustav_1" width="400" />A disastrous brain operation left Henry Molaison forever stuck in the same moment. But his amnesia proved a gift to science.</em></p>
<p>I first met Henry Molaison more than half a century ago, during the spring of my third year in graduate school. I have tried to resurrect the details of my interactions with him that week, but human memory does not allow such excursions.</p>
<p>The explicit minutiae of unique episodes fade as time passes, making it impossible for us to vividly re-experience the details of events in the distant past. What I do know is that I was very excited to have the opportunity to study such a rare case as Henry, and I had spent months preparing.</p>
<p>Looking back at the results of all the tests he did that week, it was clear even then that the consequences of the operation carried out on him in 1957 &ndash; an experimental procedure to cure his epilepsy &ndash; had been catastrophic. Henry was left in a permanent state of amnesia, unable to retain any new information.</p>
<p>At the time of Henry&rsquo;s operation, little was known about how memory processes worked. The extensive damage to the inner part of the temporal lobes on both sides of Henry&rsquo;s brain made him a vital case study for memory researchers then and now.</p>
<p>As the years passed, his fame grew and eventually spread to countries outside North America &ndash; and all that time Henry was stuck in the same moment. From time to time, I would tell him how important and well known he was, and he would smile sheepishly, as the praise was already slipping out of his&nbsp;consciousness.</p>
<p>In his lifetime he was known as HM; only after his death, in 2008, was his identity revealed to the world.</p>
<p>I moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964. There, we were fortunate to have a Clinical Research Center on campus where my colleagues and I could admit patients for days and weeks at a time to conduct research.</p>
<p>Henry visited us there on 50 occasions, and I got to know him better and better as the years went by. In addition to collecting groundbreaking data in our experiments, we also documented details of his medical condition and daily life.</p>
<p>His nursing home chart was replete with examples of persistently failed memory. Even after living there for years, he needed directions to his room, bathroom, and lounge areas.</p>
<p>Not only was he confused about finding his room but, once there, he was uncertain about which of the two beds was his and which side of the double closet housed his clothes. But occasionally, his memory was surprisingly intact.</p>
<p>In the Eighties, when he was still allowed to smoke, the staff noted, &ldquo;Henry, at times, seems to exhibit a selective memory. He has absolutely no trouble remembering when and how many cigarettes he&rsquo;s had and can at times recall staff names.&rdquo;</p>
<p>During the same period, he was troubled by false memories. On several occasions during a period of three weeks, he insisted that another resident had a pillow that had been his father&rsquo;s, stating, &ldquo;It has great value to me.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Then, one day, many years after his mother died, &ldquo;Henry came out of the lounge and stated, &lsquo;my mother is coming to visit me, and there are no chairs for her to sit in!&rsquo; When the nurse tried to convince Henry his mother wasn&rsquo;t coming, he became very insistent, throwing himself backwards and almost falling.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The note in his chart concluded, &ldquo;It seems you have to agree with him, or he becomes quite upset.&rdquo; For most of the day, Henry saved a chair &ldquo;for mother&rdquo;.</p>
<p>He never really knew who I was but, beginning in the Eighties, he would say that he knew me from high school. We had both grown up in the Hartford, Connecticut, area but he was 11 years older than I, and we attended high schools in different cities.</p>
<p>So, what gave him the idea that we were schoolmates? Over the years, he heard my name over and over, and saw my face on many occasions.</p>
<p>As a result of this constant exposure, he built up a sense of familiarity, a sense that he knew me, and this feeling likely became stronger over time.</p>
<p>I was not the only person he claimed he knew from high school. At his nursing home, there was at least one nurse whom he said he had encountered during those years. One of my fondest memories of him is that he created a special name for me: &ldquo;Doctress&rdquo;.</p>
<p>Henry was a gentle person, and also intelligent, friendly, and altruistic. In 1992, when I asked him how he felt about being a research participant, he said, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t mind. What is found out about me helps you to help others.&rdquo;</p>
<p>And that &ldquo;I figure that&rsquo;s more important in a way, and it helps restore my memory, too. And that&rsquo;s the important part right there, I say to myself. Because I know that if I could get my memory back in a way, that others can do the same; and possibly they learn too.&rdquo;</p>
<p>In talking with a student who was conducting a research project in my lab, Henry said, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a funny thing, you just live and learn. I&rsquo;m living, and you&rsquo;re learning.&rdquo;</p>
<p>I was able to track down a few of Henry&rsquo;s high-school classmates, and they all described him as a quiet person who kept to himself, and they noted that he was very polite. He smiled a lot and enjoyed interacting socially, but he lacked initiative. He waited for people to speak to him, but when they did he was very conversational.</p>
<p>Among the memories of Henry that my colleagues and I cherish are his &ldquo;Henryisms&rdquo;. These were the trademark phrases that dominated his conversation, such as &ldquo;I&rsquo;m having an argument with myself,&rdquo; &ldquo;There I have a question with myself,&rdquo; &ldquo;Question mark,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Knock on wood&rdquo;.</p>
<p>Why was he always having an argument with himself? His unrelenting amnesia kept him riding on the horns of a dilemma, which must have been unsettling. He could never be sure if he had acted improperly or like a gentleman, whether he had met a particular individual before, how old he was, what month and year we were in, and whether his memory for current events was accurate.</p>
<p>Henry knew that he was different, and unlike many of us who keep our cards close to our chest, he told us what was on his mind. His dream, his ambition, was to be a brain surgeon, yet he believed this career path was closed to him.</p>
<p>He cast himself as disqualified not because his academic credentials were insufficient but because he wore glasses. Even though he was an intelligent man, he did not consider the possibility that some neurosurgeons do wear glasses or that doctors often use a microscope to view the operating field. In this case, reason was trumped by Henry&rsquo;s overriding concern that he would harm the patient.</p>
<p>Although he was a quiet person, his inner thoughts imagined various catastrophes. When he retreated into his imagination, he witnessed the tragic scenarios that might have occurred. This line of thought was not altogether fantasy because Henry&rsquo;s neurosurgeon had deemed his operation experimental, and the experiment had failed.</p>
<p>Henry had amazing insight into his tragedy. He knew he had epilepsy and was constantly aware that he forgot things. He also knew that his operation had been tried on only a few people before him, and he had a sense that the outcome was not good.</p>
<p>In 1985, Henry shared these thoughts with a postdoctoral fellow in my lab, Jenni Ogden, a neuropsychologist from New Zealand:</p>
<p>Ogden: Do you remember when you had your operation?</p>
<p>Henry: No, I don&rsquo;t.</p>
<p>Ogden: What do you think happened there?</p>
<p>Henry: Well I think it was, well, I&rsquo;m having an argument with myself right away. I&rsquo;m the third or fourth person who had it, and I think that they, well, possibly didn&rsquo;t make the right movement at the right time, themselves then. But they learnt something.</p>
<p>We get a sense here that Henry had come to terms with his catastrophe. It is a challenge to fathom what it must have been like to live as Henry did, with his memory decimated.</p>
<p>We can imagine at least two scenarios. In the first, we would wake up every morning without a memory, and it would be like dropping into hell. We would be suspicious of any new person we encountered because we did not know whether the person was a friend or a foe, and we would be hesitant and guarded when confronting new people and places.</p>
<p>We would constantly be stressed, agitated, and mistrustful for fear that something bad would happen.</p>
<p>In a different scenario, we would greet every new person with a handshake and a smile, with a glass-half-full approach to the world. We would judge new people as friends, not foes, and we would be happy to engage in conversation with anyone who spoke to us.</p>
<p>Henry was the latter type, which made his life much more enjoyable than if he had viewed everyone as a potential enemy.</p>
<p>Henry&rsquo;s operation took a toll on behaviours apart from memory. His sense of smell was almost completely eliminated by the removal of areas in his cortex that process the odours that enter our body through our nose.</p>
<p>All he was left with was the ability to say that one test sample contained an odour and another did not. He could not identify specific odours or tell whether two odour samples were the same or different.</p>
<p>When attempting to name odours, his responses were unusual. On one occasion, he called cloves &ldquo;fresh woodwork&rdquo;, and on another he said, &ldquo;dead fish washed ashore&rdquo;. We know that the smell of food and drink contributes to our appreciation of them, but fortunately Henry&rsquo;s loss of smell did not inhibit his desire to eat and enjoy his meals.</p>
<p>Whenever I asked him whether he was hungry, he typically said, &ldquo;I can always eat.&rdquo;</p>
<p>In addition to removing the memory circuits in the temporal lobe, the surgeon took out his left and right amygdala, a complex structure that sits just in front of the hippocampus.</p>
<p>The amygdala is one of the main sites in the brain for processing emotions, especially fear, so we wondered whether Henry was ever fearful. His caregivers could not remember his being afraid of anything.</p>
<p>The one exception occurred in 1986, after he underwent hip-replacement surgery. His doctor told me that Henry was afraid of being alone, but that was temporary; he eventually returned to normal after the effects of the anaesthesia had worn off.</p>
<p>The damage to Henry&rsquo;s amygdala did affect other behaviours, and in particular, he seemed to be out of touch with his internal states.</p>
<p>Even though he enjoyed his meals, he never commented on being hungry or thirsty, and he did not complain of pain unless it was extreme. On one occasion, when a psychiatrist asked Henry in various ways about his sexual desire, he indicated that he did not have any, and believed that he did not masturbate.</p>
<p>In other words, the operation rendered him asexual.</p>
<p>Although not interested in sex, Henry was sustained by a different kind of motivation. Throughout the time I knew him, he clung to the belief that his research participation would benefit other people, and it did.</p>
<p>His case alerted neurosurgeons that they must never remove the hippocampus and surrounding structures on both sides of a patient&rsquo;s brain because if they did, the person would immediately become amnesic.</p>
<p>An offshoot of this knowledge was that neurosurgeons who wanted to remove key memory structures on one side of a patient&rsquo;s brain (say the left) had to be sure that the corresponding structures on the other side (the right) were intact. If the right side were damaged, then removing the memory area on the left side would cause a bilateral lesion and guaranteed amnesia.</p>
<p>To protect against the possibility that Henry&rsquo;s tragedy would be repeated, doctors devised a test that could be given before an operation to see whether the alleged &ldquo;good side&rdquo; was in fact undamaged.</p>
<p>The procedure was to inject each side, on separate days, with a drug that would temporarily inactivate one side of the brain. If patients showed impaired memory when the drug was given to the abnormal side, then the conclusion would be that the alleged healthy side was not functioning properly, and the operation would not be performed.</p>
<p>As crucial as this lesson was for science and medicine, Henry&rsquo;s life had a more universal impact. He showed the world that you could be saddled with a tremendous handicap and still carry on with your life and make a significant contribution.</p>
<p>He did not complain or ask for pity, and he was always a willing and cooperative research participant. Henry engaged his strong intellect to cope as best he could, and his resilience continues to be inspirational to humanity.</p>
<p>He stood tall in the face of his limitations, and never gave in to his tragedy.</p>
<p><em><em>&lsquo; <a href="http://books.telegraph.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9781846142710&amp;utm_source=tmg&amp;utm_medium=article_10047050&amp;utm_campaign=PermanentPresentTense">Permanent Present Tense</a> &rsquo; by Prof Suzanne Corkin (Allen Lane, RRP &pound;20) is available from Telegraph Books at &pound;18 plus &pound;1.35 p&amp;p. Call 0844 871 1514 or visit <a href="http://books.telegraph.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/home.do">books.telegraph.co.uk</a></em></em></p>
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<p><img class="nc_pixel" src="http://pixel.newscred.com/px.gif?key=YXJ0aWNsZT1hYTRkMGY0MmQyNDg5YzEyYmRlOTU4NWZjZDNiMzkyZSZvd25lcj05NTg4MGQwMzZjNDllMmViMGNmYjM5ZTJjNDk2MDFlZCZub25jZT00MzljNDQ3YS03NmI1LTQ5MzUtODAwNy1jNzRmNGNhMzMxN2EmcHVibGlzaGVyPThjMDBmYmVlNjFkNWJjZjBjNjA5MmQ4YjkyZWJiY2Ex" border="0" alt="" width="1" height="1" /></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-story-of-the-man-with-no-memory-2013-5#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/how-technology-is-changing-our-brains-2013-10How Technology Is Changing Our Brainshttp://www.businessinsider.com/how-technology-is-changing-our-brains-2013-10
Tue, 08 Oct 2013 07:16:35 -0400Greg Satell
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/525303c8eab8ea9d1446cbff-480-/neon-brain-1.jpg" border="0" alt="neon brain" width="480" /></p><p>A while back, Bill Keller of&nbsp;The New York Times&nbsp;stirred up a hornet&rsquo;s nest when he&nbsp;<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/magazine/the-twitter-trap.html?_r=2&amp;" target="_blank">wrote a column</a> worrying that joining Facebook would have a debilitating effect on his 13-year-old daughter&rsquo;s intellectual faculties. Technology advocates,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.digitaltonto.com/2011/why-technology-makes-us-smarter/" target="_blank">including me</a>, pounced.</p>
<p>Now there are new studies out that seem to support his argument. One shows that using search engines&nbsp;<a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6043/776.full" target="_blank">decreases our memory</a>&nbsp;and another suggests that&nbsp;<a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/40138522/ns/health-mental_health/#.Ui8LIWRARG5" target="_blank">GPS may atrophy our brains</a>. Discovery Magazine has collected a&nbsp;<a href="http://news.discovery.com/tech/technology-brain-intelligence-20130319.htm" target="_blank">half-dozen similar examples</a>&nbsp;on its site.</p>
<p>I think the question itself is misplaced. Clearly, we use technology to do things for us that we no longer are doing for ourselves and that means certain abilities degenerate. Yet, it also means that we are freeing up cognitive energy for other things. So what&rsquo;s really important is not the skills we are losing but those that we need to develop.</p>
<h3>What Makes An Expert?</h3>
<p>We come into the world not knowing much. We can&rsquo;t speak, eat by ourselves or use even the most basic household objects. Eventually, we start picking up patterns from our environment. We start babbling&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemes" target="_blank">phonemes</a>&nbsp;(elementary units of language) and then begin to combine them into words, the words into sentences and so on.</p>
<p>We learn virtually everything that way, by combining low order patterns to form higher order ones. Once we are able to understand language, we can absorb the patterns of others, learning values from our parents, social norms on the playground and eventually all the other skills that make up a modern life.</p>
<p>Experts define themselves by learning the highest order patterns through what&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._Anders_Ericsson" target="_blank">Anders Ericsson</a>&nbsp;calls&nbsp;<a href="http://www.definingsomeday.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.pdf" target="_blank">deliberate practice</a>. For example, a normal person can learn to hit a golf ball competently in a few lessons, but pro golfers continuously work to master even the most miniscule patterns inherent to the game.</p>
<p>In much the same way, surgeons spend years learning the patterns of the human body and experienced firemen become familiar with the patterns of burning buildings. An expert has&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_markers_hypothesis" target="_blank">internalized the patterns of his chosen field</a>&nbsp;and can act without thought or deliberation, but can operate seemingly by instinct.</p>
<h3>How Machines Are Taking Over</h3>
<p>The fear that new technologies lessen our ability to function is nothing new. In Plato&rsquo;s dialogue&nbsp;<a href="http://www.units.muohio.edu/technologyandhumanities/plato.htm" target="_blank">The Phaedrus</a>, Socrates worried that writing would diminish our ability to engage in conversation. Certainly, machines have hampered our ability to do physical labor and have contributed to obesity.</p>
<p>What makes the new breed of machines truly different is that they are able to&nbsp;<a href="http://www.digitaltonto.com/2013/how-the-machines-are-learning-to-take-over/" target="_blank">recognize patterns</a>&nbsp;and learn in much the same way we do. Researchers at IBM&nbsp;<a href="http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/J/J93/J93-2003.pdf" target="_blank">taught their algorithm</a>&nbsp;to translate between French and English by exposing it to proceedings of the Canadian Parliament. IBM recently&nbsp;<a href="http://www.zdnet.com/after-a-year-of-medical-school-ibms-watson-passes-first-milestone-7000011062/" target="_blank">sent its Watson computer to medical school</a>.</p>
<p>Yet computers can absorb material much faster than we can. In&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0670025291/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0670025291&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=digitont-20" target="&rdquo;_blank&rdquo;">How to Create a Mind</a><img src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=digitont-20&amp;l=as2&amp;o=1&amp;a=0670025291" border="0" alt="" width="1" height="1" />, Ray Kurzweil estimates that the human brain can recognize 100,000 patterns. In its first year as a med student, Watson took in 600,000 pieces of medical evidence, two million pages of text and 1.5 million patient records.</p>
<p>Much like in the old fable of&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)" target="_blank">John Henry</a>, we are beginning to realize that even our most ardent efforts will fall short. Just as we can&rsquo;t match the strength of a locomotive or the memory of a library, even the patterns learned in a lifetime of experience pale in comparison to the abilities that our new machines are beginning to acquire.</p>
<h3>Why Marcus Welby Was Inefficient</h3>
<p>If you find yourself unable to sleep and start surfing channels in the triple digits, you may come across some old reruns of&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Welby,_M.D." target="_blank">Marcus Welby MD</a>, a popular medical drama from the early 70&rsquo;s. It doesn&rsquo;t look like anything you&rsquo;ll see in a hospital today.</p>
<p>The first thing you&rsquo;ll notice is how much medicine has changed. You don&rsquo;t see Dr. Welby ordering a barrage of tests or asking patients what kind of insurance they have. In fact, he spends most of his time talking and getting to know each of his patients personally. He was, by today&rsquo;s standards, enormously inefficient.</p>
<p>In the decades since, we have learned to be efficiency driven machines. We&rsquo;re more data focused, evidence based and rational. Mostly, we see this as an improvement. After all, a doctor who treats more patients can cure more people. Yet we&rsquo;ve lost something too and letting machines take over gives us the opportunity to get it back.</p>
<p>As&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Pentland" target="_blank">Sandy Pentland</a>, a big data expert at MIT and one of the most cited computer scientists in the world, put it in a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2292485/not-enough-data-scientists-mit-expert-tells-computing" target="_blank">recent interview</a>, &ldquo;We teach people that everything that matters happens between your ears when in fact it actually happens between people.&rdquo;</p>
<h3>Skills For A New Age Of Inefficiency and Imprecision</h3>
<p>The truth is that technology makes us both dumber and smarter. In our technological age, we use machines to do many things we used to do for ourselves, so it shouldn&rsquo;t be surprising that we&rsquo;re getting worse at performing certain tasks. We have been engineered by evolution to conserve our limited capacities by adapting to our environment.</p>
<p>We can, if we want, choose to maintain those skills by going to the gym to replace physical work or performing mental exercises on&nbsp;<a href="http://www.lumosity.com/" target="_blank">Lumosity</a>&nbsp;to sharpen our mental faculties, but what should really concern us is building the skills we need for the the future.</p>
<p><strong>Social Skills:</strong>&nbsp;<a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Robots-Arent-the-Problem-/138007/" target="_blank">Richard Florida argues</a>&nbsp;that, as our economy is becoming more service oriented, we need to invest in social skills and points to&nbsp;<a href="http://hbr.org/2012/01/why-good-jobs-are-good-for-retailers/ar/1" target="_blank">studies</a>&nbsp;that show that such investments can earn a handsome return.</p>
<p><strong>Teamwork:&nbsp;</strong>While computers excel at problem solving, they are less able to decide which problems are important to solve or what approach can best be applied. Discovering &ldquo;what is&rdquo; and asking &ldquo;what if&rdquo; are two fundamentally different skills.</p>
<p>As&nbsp;<a href="http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~spage/bio.html" target="_blank">Scott Page</a>, an economist at the University of Michigan has found in his&nbsp;<a href="http://www.virginia.edu/vpfrr/Making%20the%20Difference-Logic%20of%20Diversity_Page_Perspectives.pdf" target="_blank">research</a>,&nbsp;complex questions are often best answered by diverse teams rather than by homogeneous groups or individuals, even if the latter are more talented.</p>
<p><strong>The New Math:</strong>&nbsp;As I&rsquo;ve argued before,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.digitaltonto.com/2011/the-future-by-design/" target="_blank">our future won&rsquo;t be made as much as it will be designed</a>&nbsp;and, for now at least, algorithms don&rsquo;t design themselves.</p>
<p>Valdis Krebs of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.orgnet.com/" target="_blank">Orgnet</a>&nbsp;points out that &ldquo;[u]niversities are still stuck on teaching 20th century math for building things rather than 21st century math for understanding things,&rdquo; and suggests that curriculums focus less on the mathematics of engineering (i.e. calculus) and more on the mathematics of patterns (i.e. set theory, graph theory, etc.).</p>
<h3>The Power To Choose</h3>
<p>What&rsquo;s most important is that technology gives us more power to choose. We are no longer stuck on the farm or in the factory, but are more free than ever to pursue our own&nbsp;<a href="http://www.digitaltonto.com/2010/the-passion-economy/" target="_blank">passion and purpose</a>.</p>
<p>For some, that will mean greater devotion to family and community, others may want to take joy in lost arts that have long outlived their usefulness and still others may devote greater time to matters of the soul. As we free ourselves from the shackles of efficiency, we are&nbsp;<a href="http://www.digitaltonto.com/2010/creating-efficiency-vs-creating-value/" target="_blank">more able to seek out value</a>.</p>
<p>The reality of modern life is that we are all uploading old patterns to the cloud to make room for new ones. The choices we make are our own. We&rsquo;re as smart as we want to be.</p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-technology-is-changing-our-brains-2013-10#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/cognitive-distortions-of-people-who-get-stuff-done-2013-95 Cognitive Distortions Successful People Use To Get Things Donehttp://www.businessinsider.com/cognitive-distortions-of-people-who-get-stuff-done-2013-9
Thu, 26 Sep 2013 08:07:00 -0400Farnam Street
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/53602033eab8ea236d2eb89f-1200-924/steve-jobs-75.jpg" border="0" alt="steve jobs" /></p><p>Michael Dearing, an associate professor at Stanford, gave an interesting (albeit speculative) presentation on&nbsp;<a href="http://quarry.stanford.edu/xapm1111126lse/docs/02_LSE_Cognitive.pdf">the five automatic thought processes</a>&nbsp;(cognitive distortions) of people who get things done.</p>
<p>The five distortions are:</p>
<p><strong>1. Personal Exceptionalism</strong></p>
<p>&hellip; a macro sense that you are in the top of your cohort, your work is snowflake-special, or that you are destined to have experiences well outside the bounds of &ldquo;normal;&rdquo; not to be confused with arrogance or high self-esteem</p>
<p><strong>2. Dichotomous Thinking</strong></p>
<p>being extremely judgmental of people, experiences, things; highly opinionated at the extremes; sees black and white, little grey &hellip;</p>
<p><strong>3. Correct Overgeneralization</strong></p>
<p>making universal judgments from limited observations and being right a lot of the time</p>
<p><strong>4. Blank-Canvas Thinking</strong></p>
<p>sees own life as a blank canvas, not a paint-by-numbers</p>
<p><strong>5. Schumpeterianism (I am a creative destruction machine.)</strong></p>
<p>In&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0061561614/farnamstreet-20" target="_blank">Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy</a>, Joseph Schumpeter writes:</p>
<p>The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation &mdash; if I may use that biological term &mdash; that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in. &hellip;&rdquo;</p>
<p>Dearing defines Schumpeterianism as:</p>
<p>sees creative destruction as natural, necessary, and as their vocation</p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/cognitive-distortions-of-people-who-get-stuff-done-2013-9#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/study-says-girls-more-affected-by-regular-bed-time-2013-7Regular Bedtime Is More Important For Girls' Brains Than Boys'http://www.businessinsider.com/study-says-girls-more-affected-by-regular-bed-time-2013-7
Tue, 30 Jul 2013 16:45:00 -0400Vivian Giang
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/51f801b6ecad04380c000018-480-/girl-sleeping-2.png" border="0" alt="girl sleeping" width="480" /></p><p>Before the age of seven, a girl's cognitive development is greatly affected by a regular bedtime.</p>
<p>Out of the 11,000 children participants in a <a href="http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2013/07/11/jech-2012-202024.full">long-term study</a>, seven-year-old girls who didn't have regular sleep schedules had IQ scores approximately nine points lower than their peers, based on cognitive tests in reading, maths, and spatial awareness.</p>
<p><span>Boys without regular sleep schedules seem to only be temporarily affected. The group of researchers a<span>t the&nbsp;</span><span>University College, London&nbsp;</span>found that boys with irregular bedtimes were recorded as having an IQ approximately six points lower than their peers at age three, but this gap diminished by age seven. The researchers have no explanation as to why sleep affects boys and girls differently.</span></p>
<p><span>In the past, sleep experts have argued that an earlier bedtime is beneficial for children.</span></p>
<p><span>However, the study &mdash;&nbsp;published in the&nbsp;<a href="http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2013/07/11/jech-2012-202024.full">Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health</a>'s July issue &mdash; says</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;that it doesn't matter what time kids go to bed as long as they consistently go to bed at the same time every night.</span></p>
<p><span>"I think the message for parents is &hellip; maybe a regular bedtime even slightly later is advisable,"&nbsp;</span><span>Amanda Sacker, director of the International Center for Lifecourse Studies in Society and Health at University College London and a co-author of the study, told&nbsp;</span><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323971204578630342181106844.html?mod=trending_now_1">Sumathi Reddy in The Wall Street Journal</a><span>.</span><span>&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span>The researchers found that brain power is heavily affected by disruptions in the circadian rhythm during childhood years. This means that irregular bedtimes can disrupt a body's natural development and growth, which then affects the brain's ability to understand and retain information.</span></p>
<p><span>The authors wanted to see whether bedtimes in early childhood were related to cognitive development. All of the participants were born&nbsp;<span>between Sept. 2000 and January 2002, and were visited by researchers at ages&nbsp;</span></span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">nine months and three, five, and seven years.</span></p>
<p><span>More than half of the children in the study went to bed between 7:30 and 8:30 p.m. and t</span>he researchers also accounted for factors such as skipping breakfast or watching too much television.</p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/study-says-girls-more-affected-by-regular-bed-time-2013-7#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/building-up-a-mental-reserve-is-just-as-important-as-saving-for-retirement-2013-7Building Up A 'Mental Reserve' Is Just As Important As Saving For Retirementhttp://www.businessinsider.com/building-up-a-mental-reserve-is-just-as-important-as-saving-for-retirement-2013-7
Fri, 19 Jul 2013 15:52:21 -0400Annie Murphy Paul
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><img style="float:right;" src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/51e99885eab8eaa03a000005-480-/crossword-puzzle-old-woman-1.jpg" border="0" alt="crossword puzzle old woman" width="480" />The continuing economic doldrums have many of us casting a worried eye on our retirement accounts. But in order to assure ourselves of a comfortable old age, there&rsquo;s another fund on which we should be keeping tabs&mdash;a mental one. Each of us should be asking ourselves: How deep is my&nbsp;</span><em style="line-height: 1.5em;">cognitive</em><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;reserve?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Cognitive reserve is the term scientists use to describe the extent of the brain&rsquo;s capacity to resist aging and degenerative conditions like Alzheimer&rsquo;s disease. The notion that such a capacity could exist originated in a surprising discovery made almost 25 years ago, when the brains of 137 elderly residents of a nursing home were dissected after their deaths.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Remarkably, researchers failed to find a direct relationship between the degree of Alzheimer&rsquo;s disease detected in the residents&rsquo; brains (revealed by the presence of structures called plaques) and how impaired they had been while they were alive. In other words, some of these individuals were able to resist the ravages of the illness better than others&mdash;but how?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The neuroscientists from the University of California, San Diego, reported that the subjects whose abilities were less affected by Alzheimer&rsquo;s were those with bigger brains and a greater number of neurons&mdash;suggestive evidence that keeping their brains active had built a bulwark against decline.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Since then, the idea that a deep cognitive reserve provides protection against mental aging has received ever more support. The latest study, to be published in the journal&nbsp;</span><em style="line-height: 1.5em;">Neurology</em><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, was posted online this month. A team led by Robert Wilson of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago enrolled almost 300 elderly people, testing their thinking and memory skills each year as they grew older. The researchers also asked participants about how often they read, wrote, and engaged in other mentally stimulating activities&mdash;not just currently but in childhood, young adulthood and middle age.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Following each participant's death his or her brain was examined, and after accounting for physical evidence of dementia, the scientists produced an amazing finding: people who made a lifelong habit of lots reading and writing slowed their rate of mental decline by 32 percent over those who engaged in only average levels of these activities. Compared to the average folks, people who rarely read or wrote experienced a decline that was 48 percent faster.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Reading and writing aren&rsquo;t the only ways to augment your cognitive reserve. Research on bilingualism by Ellen Bialystok of York University in Toronto, for example, has demonstrated that speaking more than one language delays the onset of Alzheimer&rsquo;s symptoms by an average of five years. Bialystok theorizes that the mental exercise required to speak multiple tongues&mdash;remembering which word belongs to which language&mdash;helps bilinguals build up their mental storehouse.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And Nina Kraus of Northwestern University has found that people who spend many years practicing a musical instrument are better able to respond quickly and accurately to sounds that they hear. Kraus reported that middle-aged musicians outperformed not only their non-musician peers but also non-musicians many years their junior. The mental rigor required by the practice of music effectively acted as an antidote to aging, keeping their nervous systems youthful.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">We&rsquo;ve all been taught the importance of beginning early in saving money for retirement. Accumulating&nbsp;</span><em style="line-height: 1.5em;">mental</em><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;capital&mdash;by reading and writing, speaking a second language, or practicing a musical instrument&mdash;works the same way. If you want a generous cognitive reserve to see you through your golden years, you&rsquo;d better start contributing now.</span></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/building-up-a-mental-reserve-is-just-as-important-as-saving-for-retirement-2013-7#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-story-of-the-man-with-no-memory-2013-5 The Incredible Story Of The Man With No Memoryhttp://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-story-of-the-man-with-no-memory-2013-5
Sat, 11 May 2013 13:46:10 -0400Suzanna Corkin
<p><em><img style="float:right;" src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/518e82996bb3f7f726000005-400-/henrygustav1.jpg" border="0" alt="Henry_Gustav_1" width="400" />A disastrous brain operation left Henry Molaison forever stuck in the same moment. But his amnesia proved a gift to science.</em></p>
<p>I first met Henry Molaison more than half a century ago, during the spring of my third year in graduate school. I have tried to resurrect the details of my interactions with him that week, but human memory does not allow such excursions.</p>
<p>The explicit minutiae of unique episodes fade as time passes, making it impossible for us to vividly re-experience the details of events in the distant past. What I do know is that I was very excited to have the opportunity to study such a rare case as Henry, and I had spent months preparing.</p>
<p>Looking back at the results of all the tests he did that week, it was clear even then that the consequences of the operation carried out on him in 1957 &ndash; an experimental procedure to cure his epilepsy &ndash; had been catastrophic. Henry was left in a permanent state of amnesia, unable to retain any new information.</p>
<p>At the time of Henry&rsquo;s operation, little was known about how memory processes worked. The extensive damage to the inner part of the temporal lobes on both sides of Henry&rsquo;s brain made him a vital case study for memory researchers then and now.</p>
<p>As the years passed, his fame grew and eventually spread to countries outside North America &ndash; and all that time Henry was stuck in the same moment. From time to time, I would tell him how important and well known he was, and he would smile sheepishly, as the praise was already slipping out of his&nbsp;consciousness.</p>
<p>In his lifetime he was known as HM; only after his death, in 2008, was his identity revealed to the world.</p>
<p>I moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964. There, we were fortunate to have a Clinical Research Center on campus where my colleagues and I could admit patients for days and weeks at a time to conduct research.</p>
<p>Henry visited us there on 50 occasions, and I got to know him better and better as the years went by. In addition to collecting groundbreaking data in our experiments, we also documented details of his medical condition and daily life.</p>
<p>His nursing home chart was replete with examples of persistently failed memory. Even after living there for years, he needed directions to his room, bathroom, and lounge areas.</p>
<p>Not only was he confused about finding his room but, once there, he was uncertain about which of the two beds was his and which side of the double closet housed his clothes. But occasionally, his memory was surprisingly intact.</p>
<p>In the Eighties, when he was still allowed to smoke, the staff noted, &ldquo;Henry, at times, seems to exhibit a selective memory. He has absolutely no trouble remembering when and how many cigarettes he&rsquo;s had and can at times recall staff names.&rdquo;</p>
<p>During the same period, he was troubled by false memories. On several occasions during a period of three weeks, he insisted that another resident had a pillow that had been his father&rsquo;s, stating, &ldquo;It has great value to me.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Then, one day, many years after his mother died, &ldquo;Henry came out of the lounge and stated, &lsquo;my mother is coming to visit me, and there are no chairs for her to sit in!&rsquo; When the nurse tried to convince Henry his mother wasn&rsquo;t coming, he became very insistent, throwing himself backwards and almost falling.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The note in his chart concluded, &ldquo;It seems you have to agree with him, or he becomes quite upset.&rdquo; For most of the day, Henry saved a chair &ldquo;for mother&rdquo;.</p>
<p>He never really knew who I was but, beginning in the Eighties, he would say that he knew me from high school. We had both grown up in the Hartford, Connecticut, area but he was 11 years older than I, and we attended high schools in different cities.</p>
<p>So, what gave him the idea that we were schoolmates? Over the years, he heard my name over and over, and saw my face on many occasions.</p>
<p>As a result of this constant exposure, he built up a sense of familiarity, a sense that he knew me, and this feeling likely became stronger over time.</p>
<p>I was not the only person he claimed he knew from high school. At his nursing home, there was at least one nurse whom he said he had encountered during those years. One of my fondest memories of him is that he created a special name for me: &ldquo;Doctress&rdquo;.</p>
<p>Henry was a gentle person, and also intelligent, friendly, and altruistic. In 1992, when I asked him how he felt about being a research participant, he said, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t mind. What is found out about me helps you to help others.&rdquo;</p>
<p>And that &ldquo;I figure that&rsquo;s more important in a way, and it helps restore my memory, too. And that&rsquo;s the important part right there, I say to myself. Because I know that if I could get my memory back in a way, that others can do the same; and possibly they learn too.&rdquo;</p>
<p>In talking with a student who was conducting a research project in my lab, Henry said, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a funny thing, you just live and learn. I&rsquo;m living, and you&rsquo;re learning.&rdquo;</p>
<p>I was able to track down a few of Henry&rsquo;s high-school classmates, and they all described him as a quiet person who kept to himself, and they noted that he was very polite. He smiled a lot and enjoyed interacting socially, but he lacked initiative. He waited for people to speak to him, but when they did he was very conversational.</p>
<p>Among the memories of Henry that my colleagues and I cherish are his &ldquo;Henryisms&rdquo;. These were the trademark phrases that dominated his conversation, such as &ldquo;I&rsquo;m having an argument with myself,&rdquo; &ldquo;There I have a question with myself,&rdquo; &ldquo;Question mark,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Knock on wood&rdquo;.</p>
<p>Why was he always having an argument with himself? His unrelenting amnesia kept him riding on the horns of a dilemma, which must have been unsettling. He could never be sure if he had acted improperly or like a gentleman, whether he had met a particular individual before, how old he was, what month and year we were in, and whether his memory for current events was accurate.</p>
<p>Henry knew that he was different, and unlike many of us who keep our cards close to our chest, he told us what was on his mind. His dream, his ambition, was to be a brain surgeon, yet he believed this career path was closed to him.</p>
<p>He cast himself as disqualified not because his academic credentials were insufficient but because he wore glasses. Even though he was an intelligent man, he did not consider the possibility that some neurosurgeons do wear glasses or that doctors often use a microscope to view the operating field. In this case, reason was trumped by Henry&rsquo;s overriding concern that he would harm the patient.</p>
<p>Although he was a quiet person, his inner thoughts imagined various catastrophes. When he retreated into his imagination, he witnessed the tragic scenarios that might have occurred. This line of thought was not altogether fantasy because Henry&rsquo;s neurosurgeon had deemed his operation experimental, and the experiment had failed.</p>
<p>Henry had amazing insight into his tragedy. He knew he had epilepsy and was constantly aware that he forgot things. He also knew that his operation had been tried on only a few people before him, and he had a sense that the outcome was not good.</p>
<p>In 1985, Henry shared these thoughts with a postdoctoral fellow in my lab, Jenni Ogden, a neuropsychologist from New Zealand:</p>
<p>Ogden: Do you remember when you had your operation?</p>
<p>Henry: No, I don&rsquo;t.</p>
<p>Ogden: What do you think happened there?</p>
<p>Henry: Well I think it was, well, I&rsquo;m having an argument with myself right away. I&rsquo;m the third or fourth person who had it, and I think that they, well, possibly didn&rsquo;t make the right movement at the right time, themselves then. But they learnt something.</p>
<p>We get a sense here that Henry had come to terms with his catastrophe. It is a challenge to fathom what it must have been like to live as Henry did, with his memory decimated.</p>
<p>We can imagine at least two scenarios. In the first, we would wake up every morning without a memory, and it would be like dropping into hell. We would be suspicious of any new person we encountered because we did not know whether the person was a friend or a foe, and we would be hesitant and guarded when confronting new people and places.</p>
<p>We would constantly be stressed, agitated, and mistrustful for fear that something bad would happen.</p>
<p>In a different scenario, we would greet every new person with a handshake and a smile, with a glass-half-full approach to the world. We would judge new people as friends, not foes, and we would be happy to engage in conversation with anyone who spoke to us.</p>
<p>Henry was the latter type, which made his life much more enjoyable than if he had viewed everyone as a potential enemy.</p>
<p>Henry&rsquo;s operation took a toll on behaviours apart from memory. His sense of smell was almost completely eliminated by the removal of areas in his cortex that process the odours that enter our body through our nose.</p>
<p>All he was left with was the ability to say that one test sample contained an odour and another did not. He could not identify specific odours or tell whether two odour samples were the same or different.</p>
<p>When attempting to name odours, his responses were unusual. On one occasion, he called cloves &ldquo;fresh woodwork&rdquo;, and on another he said, &ldquo;dead fish washed ashore&rdquo;. We know that the smell of food and drink contributes to our appreciation of them, but fortunately Henry&rsquo;s loss of smell did not inhibit his desire to eat and enjoy his meals.</p>
<p>Whenever I asked him whether he was hungry, he typically said, &ldquo;I can always eat.&rdquo;</p>
<p>In addition to removing the memory circuits in the temporal lobe, the surgeon took out his left and right amygdala, a complex structure that sits just in front of the hippocampus.</p>
<p>The amygdala is one of the main sites in the brain for processing emotions, especially fear, so we wondered whether Henry was ever fearful. His caregivers could not remember his being afraid of anything.</p>
<p>The one exception occurred in 1986, after he underwent hip-replacement surgery. His doctor told me that Henry was afraid of being alone, but that was temporary; he eventually returned to normal after the effects of the anaesthesia had worn off.</p>
<p>The damage to Henry&rsquo;s amygdala did affect other behaviours, and in particular, he seemed to be out of touch with his internal states.</p>
<p>Even though he enjoyed his meals, he never commented on being hungry or thirsty, and he did not complain of pain unless it was extreme. On one occasion, when a psychiatrist asked Henry in various ways about his sexual desire, he indicated that he did not have any, and believed that he did not masturbate.</p>
<p>In other words, the operation rendered him asexual.</p>
<p>Although not interested in sex, Henry was sustained by a different kind of motivation. Throughout the time I knew him, he clung to the belief that his research participation would benefit other people, and it did.</p>
<p>His case alerted neurosurgeons that they must never remove the hippocampus and surrounding structures on both sides of a patient&rsquo;s brain because if they did, the person would immediately become amnesic.</p>
<p>An offshoot of this knowledge was that neurosurgeons who wanted to remove key memory structures on one side of a patient&rsquo;s brain (say the left) had to be sure that the corresponding structures on the other side (the right) were intact. If the right side were damaged, then removing the memory area on the left side would cause a bilateral lesion and guaranteed amnesia.</p>
<p>To protect against the possibility that Henry&rsquo;s tragedy would be repeated, doctors devised a test that could be given before an operation to see whether the alleged &ldquo;good side&rdquo; was in fact undamaged.</p>
<p>The procedure was to inject each side, on separate days, with a drug that would temporarily inactivate one side of the brain. If patients showed impaired memory when the drug was given to the abnormal side, then the conclusion would be that the alleged healthy side was not functioning properly, and the operation would not be performed.</p>
<p>As crucial as this lesson was for science and medicine, Henry&rsquo;s life had a more universal impact. He showed the world that you could be saddled with a tremendous handicap and still carry on with your life and make a significant contribution.</p>
<p>He did not complain or ask for pity, and he was always a willing and cooperative research participant. Henry engaged his strong intellect to cope as best he could, and his resilience continues to be inspirational to humanity.</p>
<p>He stood tall in the face of his limitations, and never gave in to his tragedy.</p>
<p><em><em>&lsquo; <a href="http://books.telegraph.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9781846142710&amp;utm_source=tmg&amp;utm_medium=article_10047050&amp;utm_campaign=PermanentPresentTense">Permanent Present Tense</a> &rsquo; by Prof Suzanne Corkin (Allen Lane, RRP &pound;20) is available from Telegraph Books at &pound;18 plus &pound;1.35 p&amp;p. Call 0844 871 1514 or visit <a href="http://books.telegraph.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/home.do">books.telegraph.co.uk</a></em></em></p>
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<p><img class="nc_pixel" src="http://pixel.newscred.com/px.gif?key=YXJ0aWNsZT1hYTRkMGY0MmQyNDg5YzEyYmRlOTU4NWZjZDNiMzkyZSZvd25lcj05NTg4MGQwMzZjNDllMmViMGNmYjM5ZTJjNDk2MDFlZCZub25jZT00MzljNDQ3YS03NmI1LTQ5MzUtODAwNy1jNzRmNGNhMzMxN2EmcHVibGlzaGVyPThjMDBmYmVlNjFkNWJjZjBjNjA5MmQ4YjkyZWJiY2Ex" border="0" alt="" width="1" height="1" /></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-story-of-the-man-with-no-memory-2013-5#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/why-that-song-is-stuck-in-your-head-2013-4Why That Song Gets Stuck In Your Headhttp://www.businessinsider.com/why-that-song-is-stuck-in-your-head-2013-4
Tue, 23 Apr 2013 15:36:00 -0400Robert Ferris
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/4f8d7af26bb3f7f93100000b-400-300/headache-5.jpg" border="0" alt="headache-pain-wince-mistake" /></p><p>So you hear a song on the radio or at a party and four days later you find you are still humming it in the elevator on the way to the office.</p>
<p>You've been infected by an "earworm," a persistent song or sound that repeats in your brain until you consider kicking the person who introduced it to you.&nbsp;</p>
<p>They can be annoying, distracting, and can be infuriatingly difficult to get rid of.</p>
<p>Why do our own brains do this to us?</p>
<p>Ira Hyman might have a few answers. He is a psychologist at Western Washington University who studies memory, and is an authority on repetitive memories and "intrusive thoughts" like earworms.</p>
<p>Hyman and his team performed several experiments to study what they called "intrusive thoughts." In their&nbsp;paper on the phenomenon, <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.2897/abstract">published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology in December 2012</a>, this is what they found will make you more likely to be victimized by an earworm:</p>
<p><strong>1. You actually like the song.</strong></p>
<p>They found that "contrary to the belief that only obnoxious songs get stuck, we found that songs people know and like frequently became intrusive."</p>
<p>So, the idea that only awful or irritating songs stick to the brain is kind of a myth.</p>
<p>"Although annoying songs may become intrusive, this appears to be relatively rare," the paper says. In fact, two thirds of the participants surveyed in their first experiment liked the song glued to their heads.</p>
<p>"The myth is that this is obnoxious, and people talk about having 'It's a Small World' from Disneyland stuck in their head, or some awful jingle from a TV commercial," Hyman told <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/business-insider">Business Insider</a>. "But typically, the reason these things get started is because you have been exposed to the music recently. And for most of us, we listen to things we like."</p>
<p>Hate to say it, but you might like that "annoying" Justin Bieber tune more than you think.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>2. Something reminds you of the song.&nbsp;</strong></p>
<p>This one might seem obvious, but it's true.</p>
<p>If you hear a word or a phrase, or go to a place that reminds you of a song, its likely to pop back into your head. A Queen fan might hear the phrase "another one bites the dust" and think of the song by the same name.</p>
<p>Because you enjoy the song, it gets stuck on repeat.</p>
<p><strong>3. The song reflects your own individual tastes and psychology.</strong></p>
<p>Also, oddly, the "intrusive song" is more likely to be unique to you. Only one quarter of the people surveyed in Hyman's experiments had the same song as someone else.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Another scientist named Valerie Salimpoor recently published a study in the <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6129/216.abstract">journal Science on April 12</a>, which found that playing completely new songs stimulated the part of the <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/why-you-fall-in-love-with-new-songs-2013-4">brain responsible for pattern recognition</a>.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Her experiments led her to conclude that "you can't find two people in the world who have the exact same preferences in music. This is the reason why ... each brain has been shaped by the music you have heard in the past."</p>
<p><strong>4. You've heard it dozens of times.</strong></p>
<p>Though we all have our our tastes in music, popular songs seem to have a better chance of sticking in people's heads. Probably because you have heard it several times.&nbsp;</p>
<p>What sucks is when people dislike the music they hear on repeat &mdash; for example if they work in a department store or coffee shop. Even the songs they dislike &mdash; when heard over and over &mdash; stand a good chance of getting stuck in their brain.</p>
<p><strong><img class="float_left" src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/4fee204eeab8ea2950000006-559-388/screen%20shot%202012-06-29%20at%205.36.39%20pm.png" border="0" alt="cleaning-stain" width="400" /></strong></p>
<p><strong>5. You are doing something too easy. </strong></p>
<p><strong></strong>Boredom and lack of interest tend to allow intrusive thoughts to rush in. Doing dishes or walking on a treadmill are pretty easy on the brain, and leave a lot of open space for whatever thoughts happen to be waiting in the wings.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Research published in the journal <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810008001888">Consciousness and Cognition in March 2009</a> suggests that people doing boring tasks are more likely to let their mind wander, and wandering minds are more open to earworms.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Hyman's research found the same thing: People were more likely to recall and repeat a song while doing things that required "low cognitive load," such as walking, exercising, or daily routines.</p>
<p><strong>6. You are doing something too difficult.</strong></p>
<p>On the flip side, brain-taxing tasks can make your mind wander too.</p>
<p>A grueling economics midterm study session is liable to induce mind wandering. Sixty-five percent of the participants in one of Hyman's experiments reported experiencing intrusive songs when doing schoolwork (all participants were college students).&nbsp;</p>
<p>In another experiment, Hyman's team gave participants Sudoku puzzles &mdash; some were given easy ones and others were given tougher ones. The subjects with the easier puzzles were mostly able to complete them without letting in their intrusive song.</p>
<p>Those with the tougher puzzles not only had a harder time solving them, but also found they were distracted by their song more often.</p>
<p><strong>7. Someone is messing with you. <br /></strong></p>
<p>"One thing you don't get to write about is just how darned easy it is to do this," Hyman said. "You can get someone to have a thought that will stick with them for the rest of the day by humming a piece of music into their ear, if it's something they know."</p>
<p>"You can ruin someone's day by getting them to remember a song they don't like," he continued. "My students and I play games like this all the time now, where we will walk past one another in the hall and say a line from a song. It is astonishingly easy to disrupt someone's consciousness."</p>
<p><strong>But WHY?</strong></p>
<p>These intrusive thoughts may have some kind of evolutionary purpose, Hyman said. Our brains are built to see patterns in the world and to make associations among our memories and new things we encounter.&nbsp;</p>
<p>"I think these thoughts serve a lot of functions, and that is the reason we have evolved some sort of mechanism that works this way," Hyman said. "Say you are engaged in conversation with some friends and somebody says something and it reminds you of something that has happened to you. You might be at work reading something which reminds you of something else."&nbsp;</p>
<p>The mind seems to have a capacity for an "ongoing retrieval of possibly relevant things," Hyman said, and this may be related to qualities like creativity, or even survival.</p>
<p><strong>Getting that song out of your head.</strong></p>
<p>A song stuck in your head is not all that different from any other repetitive thought popping up in your head &mdash; like worries over work, painful memories, or recollections of embarrassing gaffes.</p>
<p>"Involuntary thoughts, intrusive thoughts, mind wandering, attempts at thought suppression, having a song in your head, are probably different instantiations of the same underlying problem of consciousness &mdash; the failure to stay focused, the failure to keep control," Hyman said.&nbsp;</p>
<p>The best thing to do is let them come and go on their own, and return to whatever task you happen to have at hand. It helps to pick a task that you enjoy, and that is neither too boring, nor too difficult.</p>
<p>"How actively engaged you are at any given moment also predicts whether a song is going to come back into your head," Hyman said. "My students liken this to a Goldilocks effect. ... if [your engagement level is] just right, if it's in that sweet area where it has you completely cognitively engaged, where there is not that much space left over in consciousness, it will keep these other sorts of thoughts out."</p>
<p>He added that you are better off choosing something you like, and that tends to vary from person to person. If you are going to read something, it has to be interesting to you. If you are going to do Sudoku, you have to like Sudoku.</p>
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4ecbe95769bedda829000035-400-300/5311722587_f12107fd37.jpg" border="0" alt="sit up straight meditation" /><strong>Preventing the earworm to begin with. </strong></p>
<p>If earworms are a big problem for you, devoting a few minutes a day to doing some kind of mindfulness exercise can make a huge difference, Hyman said.</p>
<p>He pointed to work by psychologists such Michael Mrazek, Jonathan Schooler, and Jonathan Smallwood, who have been working on experiments showing that just a few minutes of mindfulness training can improve focus and prevent mind wandering &mdash; including when that wandering is an intrusive song.</p>
<p>"What they have found is when people with even a little bit of mindfulness training engage in other tasks, they can stay more focused, and it seems to expand their working memory capacity. It also means they go mind wandering less often," he said.</p>
<p>It's also important to recognize that these thoughts can be natural, and even have benefits. So people shouldn't feel any need to expel all wandering thoughts from their minds.&nbsp;</p>
<p>"To a certain extent you want to allow a little mind wandering; you want to see if there are things out there that are related to what's in your head," Hyman said. "Smallwood and others have suggested that people whose minds wander more are sometimes more creative. You don't want to be always focused on one thing at a time, but at the same time you don't always want to be distracted by your thoughts. It's a fine balance."</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/why-that-song-is-stuck-in-your-head-2013-4#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/bigger-brains-come-with-a-price-2013-1Bigger Brains Come With A Pricehttp://www.businessinsider.com/bigger-brains-come-with-a-price-2013-1
Thu, 03 Jan 2013 12:05:00 -0500Randy Astaiza
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4d6e80d1ccd1d5ee69010000-400-300/neuroscience.jpg" border="0" alt="Neuroscience Brain" /></p><p>A new study on brain size published today in the journal&nbsp;<a href="%20http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.11.058">Current Biology</a> supports the idea that bigger brains make you smarter, but may come at a cost.</p>
<p>"The human brain only makes up 2 percent of our total body mass but stands for 20 percent of our total energy demand," Niclas Kolm, an animal ecologist from Uppsala University in Sweden, said in a <a href="http://www.eurekalert.org/emb_releases/2013-01/cp-bba122712.php">press release</a>. "It is a remarkably costly organ energetically."</p>
<p><span>In other words, having a larger brain can increase cognitive ability, but comes at a cost to other parts of the body because it requires more energy (</span>A previous study suggested that cooking and eating meat could have <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/human-evolution-cooking-food-2012-10">made people smart</a> because it provided humans with enough energy to support a larger brain).&nbsp;</p>
<p>"We provide the first experimental evidence that evolving a larger brain really is costly in terms of both gut investment and, more importantly, reproductive output," Kolm said</p>
<p>In the study researchers selected guppies for large and small brain sizes. The guppies with larger brains had a 9 percent larger brain than the small-brained guppies. They performed tests of numerical learning and the larger-brained female guppies significantly outperformed the female guppies with a smaller brain, but there was no difference in male guppies.</p>
<p>The difference in male and female cognitive abilities may be due to the female generally being more active and innovative while gathering food, which may have given the gender an advantage in the tests. Males guppies care about food less, which could explain why they did not perform well on the tests.&nbsp;</p>
<p>The guts from the guppies were also found to be 20 percent smaller in larger-brained guppies and they had 19 percent less offspring than their smaller brained counterparts.</p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/human-evolution-cooking-food-2012-10" >Cooking Food Could Be What Made People Smart</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/bigger-brains-come-with-a-price-2013-1#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/was-malcolm-gladwell-right-can-you-trust-your-intuition-2013-1There Are Situations Where Going With Your Gut Is A Big Mistakehttp://www.businessinsider.com/was-malcolm-gladwell-right-can-you-trust-your-intuition-2013-1
Thu, 03 Jan 2013 10:02:00 -0500Eric Barker
<p>In Malcolm Gladwell&rsquo;s fascinating bestseller&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316010669/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0316010669&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=spacforrent-20">Blink</a>, he describes many situations where you do your best thinking when you don&rsquo;t think at all.&nbsp;But he also shows plenty of scenarios where your instincts are way off.</p>
<p>What does the research say about this phenomena? How do you know when to trust your gut &mdash; and when not to?</p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>You can trust your intuition&hellip; Sometimes</strong></p>
<p>You make up your mind about someone in <a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2011/07/how-long-does-it-take-us-to-make-up-our-mind-57590/">100 milliseconds</a>. Literally.&nbsp;And more often than not, <a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2011/07/should-we-trust-our-first-impressions-of-peop/">you&rsquo;re right</a>.</p>
<p>In just five minutes you can often evaluate people with approximately 70% accuracy.</p>
<p>Via&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262515121/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0262515121&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=spacforrent-20&amp;l=as2&amp;o=1&amp;a=0262515121">Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World</a>:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">The term thin slice comes from a frequently cited article by Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, in which&nbsp;<strong>subjects evaluated thirty-second silent video clips of instructors teaching a class.&rsquo; Subsequent analysis found that these brief evaluations predicted the instructors&rsquo; end-of-semester student ratings&hellip;&nbsp;</strong><strong>Across a wide range of studies, Ambady and Rosenthal found that observations lasting up to five minutes had an average correlation of r = .39 with subsequent behavior, which corresponds to 70 percent accuracy at predicting outcomes&hellip;</strong></p>
<p>Research has shown many situations where your gut is more likely to be right than wrong:</p>
<ul>
<li>Does someone seem extraverted and conscientious to you?&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/what-can-you-accurately-tell-about-a-person-j">You&rsquo;re probably right</a>. Your instinct on whether a politician is a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2010/12/can-you-tell-if-a-politician-is-liberal-or-co/">Republican or Democrat</a>&nbsp;is likely to be accurate.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Trust your gut when determining who is a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/should-you-trust-your-gut-to-tell-you-who-is">nice person</a>&nbsp;and who is a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/can-you-tell-who-is-a-criminal-just-by-lookin">criminal</a>. You can probably tell which men are&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/slate-magazine-can-you-tell-if-a-man-is-dange">dangerous</a>&nbsp;and which are&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/can-you-tell-if-a-man-is-trustworthy-by-looki">trustworthy</a>. People can differentiate&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/can-you-tell-nobel-peace-prize-winners-from-a">Nobel Prize winners from America&rsquo;s Most Wanted</a>&nbsp;by pictures.&nbsp;If you think someone might be a psychopath, you&rsquo;re&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/would-you-know-a-psychopath-if-you-saw-one">more likely to be right than wrong</a>. On the flip side, do <em>you</em> happen to be a stone-cold psychopath? If so, trust your gut to tell you&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/can-psychopaths-assess-vulnerability-just-by">who would make a good victim</a>.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>With children and adults you can probably trust the vibe you get about&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/can-you-tell-how-smart-someone-is-just-by-loo">how smart they are</a>. (It&rsquo;s trickier with teens and the elderly.)</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/can-you-tell-if-someone-is-good-at-their-job">6 seconds of observation</a>&nbsp;will tell you who is good at their job.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Trust your gut about&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/should-you-trust-your-gut-when-deciding-wheth">whether a neighborhood is safe</a>.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>If you listen to your partner&rsquo;s voice and think they might cheat on you, there&rsquo;s a fair chance&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/can-you-predict-infidelity-just-by-hearing-so">you&rsquo;re right</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>&hellip;and sometimes our instincts are dead wrong</strong></p>
<p>The human brain uses shortcuts so it can make decisions quickly and effortlessly. While useful in most situations, these &ldquo;cognitive biases&rdquo; lead us hopelessly astray in other areas.</p>
<p>Like I said earlier, you make up our mind about someone in&nbsp;100 milliseconds. And you&rsquo;re usually right. But what happens when you&rsquo;re wrong? Does more time allow you to correct your mistake? No &mdash; when you&rsquo;re given additional time <em><a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/how-long-does-it-take-us-to-make-up-our-mind">you become more convinced you&rsquo;re right.</a></em></p>
<p>Our biases show through in daily life all the time:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Know it or not, you often decide whether or not to trust someone based on crazy reasons.&nbsp;</strong>How&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/10-fascinating-facts-about-beauty">attractive</a>&nbsp;someone is, whether they&rsquo;re&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/do-women-trust-women-or-men-more-do-men-trust">the same gender as you are</a>, whether someone&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/does-seeing-someone-blush-make-us-trust-them">blushes</a>, and the state of your ever-changing&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/do-good-moods-make-people-less-trusting">mood</a>&nbsp;all affect whether you trust somebody.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Research shows&nbsp;<strong>things that are easy for our brain to process&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2012/08/does-easy-to-understand-true/">feel more true</a></strong>&nbsp;than concepts that require work.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>We prefer <a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2012/01/do-we-prefer-honesty-or-eloquence/">eloquence over honesty</a>: &ldquo;<strong><em>People who dodge questions artfully are liked and trusted more than people who respond to questions truthfully but with less polish.</em>&ldquo;</strong></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>We prefer confidence <a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2011/11/do-we-prefer-confidence-or-expertise/">over real expertise</a>. In his book&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307459667/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=spacforrent-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0307459667">The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us</a>,&nbsp;Dan Simons explains that doctors who are thorough and double check are trusted less than those who show blind confidence:</li>
</ul>
<p style="padding-left: 60px;"><strong>The patients viewing these videos found the confident doctors most satisfying, and they rated the one who looked in a book to be the least satisfying of all.</strong></p>
<p>You may be thinking &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t do that.&rdquo; But one of the reasons you aren&rsquo;t able to correct for these biases is because of just that kind of delusional overconfidence.</p>
<p>David Brooks, author of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/140006760X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=spacforrent-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=217145&amp;creative=399369&amp;creativeASIN=140006760X">The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement</a>&nbsp;points out overestimating our abilities is our&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/are-you-dangerously-overconfident">natural state</a>:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Human beings are overconfidence machines.</strong>&nbsp;Paul J. H. Schoemaker and J. Edward Russo gave questionnaires to more than two thousand executives in order to measure how much they knew about their industries.&nbsp;<strong>Managers in the advertising industry gave answers that they were ninety-per-cent confident were correct. In fact, their answers were wrong sixty-one per cent of the time. People in the computer industry gave answers they thought had a ninety-five per cent chance of being right; in fact, eighty per cent of them were wrong. Ninety-nine per cent of the respondents overestimated their success.</strong></p>
<p>In fact, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/malcolm-gladwell" class="hidden_link">Malcolm Gladwell</a> gave a great talk about why the overconfidence of smart people can be far more dangerous than the incompetence of stupid people.&nbsp;</p>
<p>And if you&rsquo;re not focused and paying attention, your brain can be extremely unreliable.</p>
<p>As the research of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307459667/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=spacforrent-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=217145&amp;creative=399373&amp;creativeASIN=0307459667">Dan Simons</a>&nbsp;demonstrates, you may not even notice if the person in front of you <em>is replaced with someone completely different</em>:&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>So what should you do?</strong></p>
<p>Obviously, in the areas I mentioned above you now know when you can or can&rsquo;t trust your gut.</p>
<p>Past that, there&rsquo;s no replacement for observing you&rsquo;re own behavior and seeing what you&rsquo;re right and wrong about. (And write them down. You can&rsquo;t trust your memory. <a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2011/08/why-are-we-so-bad-at-predicting-what-will-mak/">No, you can&rsquo;t</a>.)</p>
<p>But are there any good rules of thumb?&nbsp;Here are two:</p>
<p><strong>1) Definitely trust your gut on a subject &mdash; <em><a href="http://psychcentral.com/news/2012/12/17/intuitive-decisions-are-fine-for-experts/49222.html">if it&rsquo;s something you&rsquo;re an expert at</a></em>:</strong></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">A new study from researchers at Rice University, George Mason University and Boston College suggests <strong>you should trust your gut &mdash; but only if you&rsquo;re an expert&hellip;&nbsp;Across both studies, participants who possessed expertise within the task domain performed on average just as well intuitively as analytically.</strong> In addition, experts significantly outperformed novices when making their decisions intuitively but not when making their decisions analytically.</p>
<p>And this research&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2011/08/is-malcolm-gladwells-blink-right-about-the-po/">has been replicated</a>.&nbsp;It&rsquo;s interesting to note that Malcolm Gladwell&rsquo;s follow up to&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316010669/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0316010669&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=spacforrent-20">Blink</a>&nbsp;was a book about expertise:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316017930/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0316017930&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=spacforrent-20">Outliers</a>.</p>
<p><strong>2)&nbsp;For simple decisions without many factors involved (<em>What soda should I buy?</em>) be rational. For very complex or weighty decisions (<em>What career should I pursue?</em>) trust your gut.</strong></p>
<p>Via&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0618620117?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=spacforrent-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=0618620117">How We Decide</a>:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>If the decision doesn&rsquo;t matter all that much, the prefrontal cortex should take the time to carefully assess and analyze the options.</strong> On the other hand, for important decisions about complex items-leather couches, cars, and apartments, for example-categorizing by price alone will eliminate a lot of essential information. Perhaps the cheapest couch is of inferior quality, or maybe you don&rsquo;t like the way it looks. And should anyone really choose an apartment or a car based on a single variable, such as the monthly rent or the amount of horsepower? As Dijksterhuis demonstrated, when you ask the prefrontal cortex to make these sorts of decisions, it makes consistent mistakes. You&rsquo;ll end up with an ugly couch in the wrong apartment. It might sound ridiculous, but it makes scientific sense: <strong>Think less about those items that you care a lot about. Don&rsquo;t be afraid to let your emotions choose.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Join 25K+ readers.</strong>&nbsp;Get a free weekly update via email&nbsp;<a href="http://eepurl.com/o6uAD">here</a>.</p>
<p>Related posts:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2012/03/can-you-learn-to-dissect-peoples-personalitie/">Can you learn to dissect people&rsquo;s personalities from a distance like Sherlock Holmes?</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2012/08/what-does-it-take-to-become-an-expert-at-anyt/">What does it take to become an expert at anything?</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2012/10/malcolm-gladwell-asks-is-first-third/">Malcolm Gladwell asks &ldquo;Is it better to come in first&hellip; or third?&rdquo;</a></p>
<p><strong>Read more posts on <a href="http://www.bakadesuyo.com/">Barking Up The Wrong Tree &raquo;</a></strong></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/was-malcolm-gladwell-right-can-you-trust-your-intuition-2013-1#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/should-doctors-prescribe-smart-drugs-2012-12It Can Be Risky For Doctors To Prescribe 'Smart Drugs' To Healthy Peoplehttp://www.businessinsider.com/should-doctors-prescribe-smart-drugs-2012-12
Wed, 26 Dec 2012 16:57:00 -0500Annie Murphy Paul
<p><strong>A new report warns that doctors should not prescribe psychiatric medication to healthy people who use them as &ldquo;cognitive enhancers.&rdquo; On the PsychCentral website, <a href="http://psychcentral.com/news/2012/12/18/cognitive-enhancers-should-not-be-prescribed-for-healthy-individuals/49266.html">Rick Nauert writes:</a></strong></p>
<p>&ldquo;Researchers from the Institut de Recherches Cliniques de Montr&eacute;al (IRCM) led by Dr. Eric Racine base their recommendation on the professional integrity of physicians, the drugs&rsquo; uncertain benefits and harms, and limited health care resources.</p>
<p>"The study report is found in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ).</p>
<p>"Currently, prescription stimulants and other pharmaceuticals are often used by healthy people to enhance concentration, memory, alertness and mood, a phenomenon described as cognitive enhancement. However, they are generally only approved for use to treat actual mental illnesses and psychiatric disorders, like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).</p>
<p>"'Individuals take prescription stimulants to perform better in school or at work,' said Racine, a Montr&eacute;al neuroethics specialist.</p>
<p>"Experts say the prevalence of cognitive enhancers used by students on university campuses ranges from 1 per cent to 11 per cent. Authorities warn that taking such stimulants is associated with risks of dependence, cardiovascular problems, and psychosis.</p>
<p>"&lsquo;Current evidence has not shown that the desired benefits of enhanced mental performance are achieved with these substances,&rsquo; explains Cynthia Forlini, first author of the study and doctoral student in Racine&rsquo;s research unit. &lsquo;With uncertain benefits and clear harms, it is difficult to support the notion that physicians should prescribe a medication to a healthy individual for enhancement purposes.&rsquo;&rdquo; (Read more&nbsp;<a href="http://psychcentral.com/news/2012/12/18/cognitive-enhancers-should-not-be-prescribed-for-healthy-individuals/49266.html">here</a>.)</p>
<p><strong>What do you think? Should &ldquo;smart drugs&rdquo; be prescribed to people who don&rsquo;t suffer from a psychiatric condition?</strong></p>
<p><strong>If you&rsquo;re interested in learning more about &ldquo;neuroenhancing&rdquo; drugs, read Margaret Talbot&rsquo;s excellent article in the&nbsp;<em>New Yorker</em>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/04/27/090427fa_fact_talbot">here</a></strong>.</p>
<p><strong>DON'T MISS: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/technology-not-re-wiring-kids-brains-2012-12">How Technology Impacts Our Kids' Brains</a></strong></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/should-doctors-prescribe-smart-drugs-2012-12#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p>